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

by John Le Carré

Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.

The boy had invented a game. He had laid a table on its side and was rolling an empty bottle onto the gravel. Each time, he started the bottle higher up the table-top. Smiley left before it smashed.

“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?”

he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion;

There are moments that are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.