Boadicea > Boadicea's Quotes

“What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? (...) To know, really and absolutely know, that there's a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today's Grand Design? (ch. 14)”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“When Schulmann talked, he fired off conflicting ideas like a spread of bullets, then waited to see which ones went home and which came back at him. The sidekick's voice followed like a stretcher-party, softly collecting up the dead. (...) Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn't. (part I, chapter 1)”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Charlie alone knew he was a ghost.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“The greatest crime is to do nothing because we can only do a little (...) I feel nothing, because feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist. (part I, chapter 10)”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Demos are mock battles, never the real thing. Everybody knows where they're going to happen, and when and why. Nobody gets seriously hurt. Well, not unless they ask for it. (ch. 4)”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“What did theories matter any more? She wanted to say. The rats have taken over the ship, it's often as simple as that; the rest is narcissistic crap. It must be. (...) For exploitation read property and you have the whole bit. First the exploiter hits the wage-slave over the head with his superior wealth; then he brainwashes him into believing that the pursuit of property is a valid motive for breaking him at the grindstone. That way he has him hooked twice over. (...) "You disappoint me, Charlie. All of a sudden you lack consistency. You've made the perceptions. Why don't you go out and do something about them? Why do you appear here one minute as an intellectual who has the eye and brain to see what is not visible to the deluded masses, the next you have not the courage to go out and perform a small service - like theft - like murder - like blowing something up - say, a police station - for the benefit of those whose hearts and minds are enslaved by the capitalist overlords? Come on, Charlie, where's the action? You're the free soul around here. Don't give us the words, give us the deeds." (...) Anger suspended her bewilderment and dulled the pain of her disgrace (...) She wished terribly that she could go mad so that everyone would be sorry for her; she wished she was just a raving lunatic waiting to be let off, not a stupid little fool of a radical actress (...) (part I, chapter 7)”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“there is no reward for love except the experience of loving, and nothing to be learned by it except humility.”
― John le Carré

“Dash it all, she’s an actress! Don’t take her so seriously. Actors don’t have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There’s a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she’ll be Born Again!”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“It’s a little difficult to know when to trust you people and when not.”
― John le Carré

“It was the most monotonous day of my life,” he replied without a second’s hesitation. Then his rigid face broke and re-formed itself into the best smile ever, so that for a moment he really did look as if he had slipped through the bars of whatever confined him. “As a matter of fact, I thought you quite excellent,” he said. This time she did not object to his choice of adjective. “Will you crash the car now, please, Jose? This will do me fine. I’ll die here.” And before he could stop her, she had grabbed his hand and kissed him hard on the knuckle of his thumb.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Gossip till the cows come home.”
― John le Carré

“When people ask me whether I am a spy –‘are you now, or have you ever been?’ –I am tempted to reply with a hearty –‘Yes, and since the age of five.’ For a state of watchfulness must surely be the first requisite of a writer, as it is of a secret agent. A writer, like a spy, must prey upon his neighbours; like a spy he is dependent on those whom he deceives; like a spy he must somehow contrive to keep a distance from his own feelings and by doing so conjure up a package that will meet with the approval of his masters. Like a spy, he is not merely an outsider, but implicitly a subversive..”
― John le Carré

“Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee...Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us...We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within… We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.”
― John le Carré

“And all right, it’s Merrie bloody England, it’s Laura bloody Ashley, it’s ale and pasties and yo-ho for Cornwall, and tomorrow morning all these nice, sweet people will be back at each other’s throats, screwing each other’s wives and doing all the stuff the rest of the world does. But right now it’s their National Day, and who’s an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what’s inside?”
― John le Carré, A Delicate Truth

“She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her drifting, their straight line. After all her guilt and concealment, their acceptance. After all her words, their action, their abstemiousness, their clear-eyed zeal, their authenticity, their true allegiance, to fill the emptiness that had yawned and screamed inside her like a bored demon ever since she could remember.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“The defended softness, that’s what I look for in the gals.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“and marvelled at the self-regarding irrelevance of the ruling English mind.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Those who are treated as pariahs become pariahs—just as, to quote Auden, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.”
― John Le Carre

“Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.”
― John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

“The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.”
― John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man

“In extreme old age you suddenly find you are unable to run uphill, two buckets full of hen food are heavier than they were and the cheerful scream of hearing aids, provided they are working, is a welcome sound. Other things go wrong. Paddy Leigh Fermor, aged ninety-four came to stay, got into the bath, looked down at the tap end and to his dismay saw that both feet had turned black. ‘Oh God,’ he thought, ‘Teeth, ears and eyes are wonky and now my feet.’ He need not have worried. he had got into the bath with his socks on.”
― Deborah Devonshire

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."

In 1984, Huxley added, "people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us".”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business