Matt > Matt's Quotes

“A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.” Other”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands; the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face, beyond a steady fading of its hopes”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“All you ever were was a piece of the universe thinking to itself”
― Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail