Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (The Karla Trilogy, #1)

by John le Carré

It’s a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not. You do live by rather different standards, don’t you? I mean you have to. I accept that.

Each morning as he got out of bed, each evening as he went back to it, usually alone, he had reminded himself that he never was and never had been indispensable.

Not of course that she knew anything, but what woman was ever stopped by a want of information? She felt. And despised him for not acting in accordance with her feelings.

“There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,”

There is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

“I cough when there are things I can’t say,”

“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:

“I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,” Smiley went on, more lightly. “Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things. What do you think of it?”

That in the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery?

To safe houses belongs a certain standard of catering. Either you are pretending that you live there or that you are adept anywhere; or simply that you think of everything.

Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves . . . You’re the last, George, you and Bill.” He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed, like Percy’s, upon the world’s game; for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water.

he was his inspiration, the torch-bearer of a certain kind of antiquated romanticism, a notion of English calling which—for the very reason that it was vague and understated and elusive—had made sense of Guillam’s life till now. In that moment, Guillam felt not merely betrayed but orphaned.

“In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen . . .