Call for the Dead Quotes

“She had the experience to suffer with discretion.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“But gossip must see its characters
in black and white, equip them with
sins and motives easily conveyed in
the shorthand of conversation.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. ...when had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“It dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle-age without ever being young, and that he was, in the nicest possible way, "on the shelf".”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“society is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Can't you see it's the same? The same guns, the same children dying in the streets? Only the dream has changed, the blood is the same colour. Is that what you want?”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“However closely we live together, at whatever time of day or night we sound the deepest thoughts in one another, we know nothing.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“He had the nerve not to drink in a University where you proved your manhood by being drunk most of your first year.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“They never understand it, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you, when you're alone? You've got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you're not a part of it.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“To dream in doctrines, how tidy!”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“They loved each other and believed they loved mankind, they fought each other and believed they fought the world.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“He appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“His secretive nature detested the purpose of all interviews, their oppressive intimacy, their inescapable reality.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept, his insincerity when he defended the vagaries of his subordinates, his flexibility when formulating new commitments. Nor did he let go the advantages of a cloak and dagger man malgré lui, wearing the cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“There was a pause. Mendel said: 'It's the devil you don't know that gets you.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Her instinct was to defend, to hoard the treasures of her life, to build about herself the symbols of normal existence.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“It comforted the great to deal with it and they knew, a man who could reduce any color to grey.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“There had been a time when the mere business of driving a car was a relief to him; when he had found in the un-reality of a long, solitary journey a palliative to his troubled brain, when the fatigue of several hours’ driving had allowed him to forget more sombre cares.
It was one of the subtler landmarks of middle age, perhaps, that he could no longer thus subdue his mind. It needed sterner measures now: he even tried on occasion to plan in his head a walk through a European city – to record the shops and buildings he would pass, for instance, in Berne on a walk from the Münster to the university. But despite such energetic mental exercise, the ghosts of time present would intrude and drive his dreams away. It was Ann who had robbed him of his peace, Ann who had once made the present so important and taught him the habit of reality, and when she went there was nothing.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr. Smiley,” she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; “and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Mendel hated motorists. Give a man a car of his own and he leaves humility and common sense behind him in the garage.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“They might have you, and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Il savait qu'un être intelligent pouvait être neutralisé par la stupidité de ses supérieurs, et des semaines d'un travail patient, acharné - vingt-quatre heures sur vingt-quatre - annihilées par ce genre de personnages. (chapitre 6)”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Les mauvaises langues ont l'habitude de voir leurs cobayes tout en noir ou tout en blanc et de leur attribuer des défauts ou des mobiles que le style sténographique de la conversation peut aisément suggérer.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that ‘Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou’wester’. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince. Was”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead

“Dieter had a theory that was pure Faust. Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. He used to say that the greatest mistake man ever made was to distinguish between the mind and the body: an order does not exist if it is not obeyed.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead