The Russia House Quotes

“Spying is waiting.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“She's become a Russian again, he thought. When something works, she's grateful. When it doesn't work, it's life.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“... in moments of crisis our thoughts do not run consecutively but rather sweep over us in waves or intuition and experience ...”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never."

"So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?"

"Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Some men will never be heroes, some heroes will never be men, he thought, with urgent acknowledgements to Joseph Conrad.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Merridew might not have been the slenderest of men or the tallest. But he had grip, he had cunning and like many fat men he had unexpected resources of indignation which he was able to turn on like a flood when they were needed.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“CIA Interrogator:
Have you ever met any jazz musicians you would describe, or who would describe themselves, as anarchists?

Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair:
Hmmm... ah, there was a trombone player, Wilfred Baker.

Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair:
He's the only jazz musician I can think of who is completely devoid of anarchist tendencies.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Todd and Larry were Quinn’s people. They were clean-limbed and pretty and, for a man of my age, ludicrously youthful.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“There was only now [ ... ] There was no tomorrow because tomorrow was the excuse. There was now or there was nowhere.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“si les Américains s'étaient donné autant de mal pour le désarmement que pour envoyer un pauvre type sur la lune, ou coller des rayures roses dans le dentifrice, on l'aurait depuis longtemps, le désarmement. (...) le plus grand péché de l'Occident était de croire qu'il pouvait foutre en l'air le système soviétique par une surenchère dans la course aux armements, parce que dans ce cas-là, on jouait avec le destin de l'humanité. Et qu'en mettant sabre au clair, l'Ouest avait fourni un bon prétexte aux dirigeants soviétiques pour garder leur rideau baissé et instituer un État militaire. (chapitre 4)”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Les experts sont des fanatiques. Ils ne résolvent rien! Ils sont à la solde du système qui les emploie. Ils le perpétuent. Quand nous nous ferons torturer, ce sera par des experts. Quand nous serons pendus, ce sera par des experts. (...) Quand le monde sera détruit, ce ne sera pas par des fous, mais par de sages experts et par l'ignorance incommensurable des bureaucrates. (chapitre 10)”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“si quelque chose peut nous sauver, ce dont je doute, ce sera la vanité (...) aucun chef d'état ne souhaite passer à la postérité comme étant le taré qui a anéanti son pays en un après-midi. Et puis la trouille, peut-être. Dieu soit loué! la plupart de nos beaux politiciens ont une aversion narcissique pour l'auto-destruction. (chapitre 5)”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Her palm was broad and strong and dry. Its nakedness against his own was like the gift of her entire body.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“The Soviet Knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one. Believe me.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“In Russia we have secrecy and we have loneliness, but we have no word for privacy.”
― John Le Carré, The Russia House

“Today one must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

(Quote in his book taken from Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, page 101)”
― John Le Carré, The Russia House

“The Soviet knight is dying inside his armour. He is a secondary power like you British. He can start a war but cannot continue one and cannot win one.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Often he seemed to embrace the entire ethic of our trade without demur. After all, he declared to Walter, was not seeming the only kind of being? Oh my God, yes! Walter cried, delighted - and not only in our trade! And was not the whole of man's identity a cover? Barley insisted: and was not the only world worth living in the secret one? Walter assured him that it was, and advised him to take up permanent residence there before prices rose.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“Spying is waiting. Spying is worrying. Spying is being yourself but more so.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“That’s what I do. I bewitch people, then the moment they’re under my spell I cease to feel anything for them.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“In the beginning was not the word, not the deed, not the silly serpent. In the beginning was why?”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“She'll come, he told me as he gazed out at the harbour. They promised that one day she would come.

Not at once, and in their time, not in Barley's. But she would come, he had no doubt. Maybe this year, maybe next, he said. But something inside the mountainous bureaucratic Russian belly would heave and give birth to a mouse of compassion. He had no doubt of it. It would be gradual but it would happen. They had promised him.

'They don't break their promises,' he assured me, and in the face of such trust it would have been churlish in me to contradict him. But something else was preventing me from voicing my customary scepticism. It was Hannah again. I felt she was begging me to let him live with his humanity, even if I had destroyed hers.”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“he was proud of having thrown caution”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“What's it got to do with you and the CIA whether I came here with a woman or a Muscovy duck?”
― John le Carré, The Russia House

“É caminhando que aprendo o rumo do meu caminho”
― John le Carré, The Russia House