The Little Drummer Girl Quotes

“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“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

“The Armorys of this world don't steal. They serve their country right or wrong. Or they do until the day when they come face to face with real life and their warped rectitude deserts them and their faces unlock and become real, puzzled faces like everybody else's. So there's another god for you that's passed its sell-by date: enlightened patriotism, until this afternoon Nick Armory's religion. (ch. 14)”
― 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

“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

“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

“A terrorist for Karen is someone who has a bomb but no aeroplane.
Ch. 4”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“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

“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

“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

“It’s the German version of the Hebrew version of the German version of his name,” Litvak replied, without humour. “At the request of his employers, he’s reverted. He’s not an Israeli anymore, he’s a Jew.”
― 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

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

“He had asked for pasta and ate it the prisoner’s way, using his spoon and fork automatically, not bothering to look down.”
― John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Schulmann came not to Bonn but to Munich, and not as Schulmann either, and neither Alexis nor his Silesian successor was aware of his arrival, which was what he intended. His name, if he had one, was Kurtz, though he used it so seldom he might have been forgiven if one day he forgot it altogether. Kurtz meaning short; Kurtz of the short cut, said some; his victims—Kurtz of the short fuse. Others made laborious comparisons with Joseph Conrad’s hero. Whereas the bald truth was that the name was Moravian and was originally Kurz, till a British police officer of the Mandate, in his wisdom, had added a “t”—and Kurtz, in his, had kept it, a sharp little dagger jabbed into the bulk of his identity, and left there as some kind of goad.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“that thirty years of Israel have turned the Palestinians into the new Jews of the earth?”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“He had granted her an early glimpse of the new family she might care to join, knowing that deep down, like most rebels, she was only looking for a better conformity.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“We live for such a short time, he liked to tell you with a twinkle, and we are far too long dead.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“He’s come to collect my soul, she thought as she swung jauntily past him in order to demonstrate her immunity. Yet when did I ever promise him he could have it?”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Yet both behaved as if the meeting had scarcely taken place: she by pulling her revolutionist’s frown and holding out her hand for an English schoolgirl’s handshake of quite vicious respectability; and he by casting her a glance of calm and tolerant appraisal, strangely without ambition. “Well, Charlie, yes, hullo,” he agreed, and smiled no more than was necessary to be polite. So it was actually he, not Charlie, who said hullo.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“You preach at me like the English!” Gavron the Rook squawked at him in his cracked voice, during one of their frequent arguments. “And look at their crimes!” “So maybe we should bomb the English too,” Kurtz suggested, with a furious smile. But the subject of the English was by then not coincidental; for ironically it was to England that Kurtz was now looking for his salvation.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“they gave her a guitar, which was a nice touch because these days a guitar legitimises a girl even if she can’t play it.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“His name meant originally “Jew from Lithuania” and was once derogatory. How did he see himself? One day as a twenty-four-year-old kibbutz orphan without a known relation alive, another as the adopted child of an American Orthodox foundation and the Israeli special forces. On another again, as God’s devoted policeman, cleaning the world up. He played the piano wonderfully.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Of the Palestinians, some are dead, others are taken prisoner, the rest presumably are for the most part homeless or dispersed. The fighting boys who looked after me in the upper flat in Sidon and chatted with me in the tangerine groves; the bombweary but indomitable refugees of the camps at Rashidiyeh and Nabatiyeh: from what I hear, their fate is little different from that of their reconstructed counterparts in this story.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Faith leaves a vacuum behind it when it goes away. We’re in it.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl

“Do you think we do not understand that your politics are the externalisation of a search for dimensions and responses not supplied to you when you most needed them? We're your friends, Charlie.”
― John le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl