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Frightened people never learn,
She seemed to be without embarrassment, like a listening animal. It’s the authority of suffering, I thought, remembering her lover’s suicide, she cannot be reached by small worries.
And the truth is that, at that moment and at that age, I had not yet acquired the power to distinguish between truth and beauty.
And when I think of Mabel, I can only explain her as the lure of domesticity to a man returned from the front line.
There are deaths we unconsciously prepare for, depending on our choice of trades. An undertaker contemplates his funerals, the richman his destitution, the gaoler his imprisonment, the debauchee his impotence.
For as long as rogues become leaders, we shall spy. For as long as there are bullies and liars, and madmen in the world we shall spy. For as long as nations compete, and politicians deceive, and tyrants launch conquests, and consumers need resources, and the homeless look for land, and the hungry for food, and the rich for excess, your chosen profession is perfectly secure, I can assure you.”
those who, having lost all they possess, have only the future to win.
proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.
“I won’t be part of your pattern,” Sally had said to me the night before. “Patterns are for breaking.”
A traitor needs two things, Smiley had once remarked bitterly to me at the time of Haydon’s betrayal of the Circus: somebody to hate, and somebody to love.
And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser.
History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
The bear is broke, lazy, volatile, incompetent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant. Without his claws, he’d be just another chaotic member of the Third World.
Think there aren’t slaves today? Think capital doesn’t depend on slaves.
