The Looking Glass War Quotes

“Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God.”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“He was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but his own destruction”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“For Heaven’s sake, Adrian, do you think Intelligence consists of unassailable philosophical truths? Does every priest have to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day?”
― John le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Leclerc said casually, everyone watching, ‘And the schedule? Who takes care of that? We’ve an agent in the field, you know.’ It was only a small point. ‘He’ll have to manage by himself.’ ‘The war rules.’ Leclerc spoke proudly. ‘We play the war rules. He knew that. He was well trained.’ He seemed reconciled; the thing was dismissed.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Smiley still did not go. ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘You’ll never tell me, will you? I just wonder.’ He was not looking at Control. ‘My dear George, what has come over you?’ ‘We handed it to them. The passport that was cancelled . . . a courier service they never needed . . . a clapped-out wireless set . . . papers, frontier reports . . . who told Berlin to listen for him? Who told them what frequencies? We even gave Leclerc the crystals, didn’t we? Was that just Christian charity too? Plain, idiot Christian charity?’ Control was shocked. ‘What are you suggesting? How very distasteful. Who ever would do a thing like that?’ Smiley was putting on his coat. ‘Goodnight, George,’ Control said; and fiercely, as if he were tired of sensibility: ‘Run along. And preserve the difference between us: your country needs you. It’s not my fault they’ve taken so long to die.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Smiley watched him with scepticism. ‘We could have stopped them,’ he said. ‘We knew enough.’ ‘Of course we could,’ Control said blandly. ‘D’you know why we didn’t? Plain, idiot Christian charity. We let them have their war game.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“What Ministry?’ Smiley asked. ‘Leclerc’s. Have you any idea what’s going on?’ Smiley said, ‘Yes. Haven’t you?’ ‘Leclerc’s so vulgar. I admit, I find him vulgar. He thinks we compete. What on earth would I do with his dreadful militia? Scouring Europe for mobile laundries. He thinks I want to gobble him up.’ ‘Well, don’t you? Why did we cancel that passport?’ ‘What a silly man. A silly, vulgar man. However did Haldane fall for it?’ ‘He had a conscience once. He’s like all of us. He’s learnt to live with it.’ ‘Oh dear. Is that a dig at me?”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“He heard Johnson’s benign voice running on about the aerial: ‘If it’s indoors it’s a headache, and indoors it’ll be. Now listen: zig-zag fashion across the room, quarter the length of your wave and one foot below the ceiling. Space them wide as possible, Fred, and not parallel to metal girders, electric wires and that. And don’t double her back on herself, Fred, or you’ll muck her up properly, see?’ Always the joke, the copulative innuendo to aid the memory of simple men.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“He remembered Avery: the warmth and English decency of their early companionship; he remembered his young face glistening in the rain, and his shy, dazzled glance as he dried his spectacles, and he thought: he must have said thirty-two all the time. I misheard.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“When we met him he was a man without love. Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray. We ourselves live without it in our profession. We don’t force people to do things for us. We let them discover love. And, of course, Leiser did, didn’t he? He married us for money, so to speak, and left us for love. He took his second vow. I wonder when.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“You know, it doesn’t seem real. In the war, there was no question. They went or they refused. Why did he go, Avery? Jane Austen said money or love, those were the only two things in the world. Leiser didn’t go for money.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“I’ve been trying to remember,’ he continued, ‘at home. There was this school. A big courtyard like a barracks with nothing but windows and drainpipes. We used to bang a ball round after lunch. Then a gate, and a path to the church, and the river on the other side . . .’ He was laying out the town with his hands, placing bricks. ‘We went on Sunday, through the side door, the kids last, see?’ A smile of success. ‘That church was facing north,’ he declared, ‘not east at all.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Avery, sitting next to Leiser, was sunk in his own thoughts. He realised with what he took to be utter detachment that, whilst his own mission had unfolded as comedy, Leiser was to play the same part as tragedy; that he was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but at his own destruction.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“By way of emphasis the Western side is adorned with the grotesque statuary of political impotence: a plywood model of the Brandenburg Gate, the screws rusting in their sockets, rises absurdly from an untended field; notice boards, broken by wind and rain, display fifteen-year-old slogans across an empty valley.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Leclerc now addressed himself to the question of Leiser’s target; he gave a résumé of the indicators, implying somehow that they only confirmed suspicions which he himself had long harboured. He employed a tone which Avery had not heard in him before. He sought to imply, as much by omission and inference as by direct allusion, that theirs was a Department of enormous skill and knowledge, enjoying in its access to money, its intercourse with other services and in the unchallenged authority of its judgements an unearthly, oracular immunity, so that Leiser might well have wondered why, if all this were so, he need bother to risk his life at all.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Leclerc had a habit, when making a joke, of holding himself at attention and lifting his heels from the ground as if to launch his wit upon the higher air.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“In the war it was easier because, however bad it got, you thought one day we’d win. Even if you were picked up, you thought, “They’ll come and get me, they’ll drop some men or make a raid.” You knew they never would, see, but you could think it. You just wanted to be left alone to think it. But nobody wins this one, do they?”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“There was a particularly absurd scene one breakfast. Leiser raised the lid of a jam-pot, peered inside and, turning to Avery, asked, ‘Is this bee-honey?’ Johnson leant across the table, knife in one hand, bread and butter in the other. ‘We don’t say that, Fred. We just call it honey.’ ‘That’s right, honey. Bee-honey.’ ‘Just honey,’ Johnson repeated. ‘In England we just call it honey.’ Leiser carefully replaced the lid, pale with anger. ‘Don’t you tell me what to say.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Avery too had gone out alone. To Haldane he had said he was taking a walk, to Johnson that he was going to the cinema. Avery had a way of lying which defied rational explanation. He found himself drawn to the old places he had known; his college in the Turl; the bookshops, pubs and libraries. The term was just ending. Oxford had a smell of Christmas about it, and acknowledged it with prudish ill will, dressing the shop windows with last year’s tinsel.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“He had acquired from his neighbourhood or his clients certain turns of phrase which, though wholly without meaning, impressed his foreign ear. He would speak, for instance, of ‘some measure of satisfaction’, using an impersonal construction for the sake of dignity. He had assimilated also a variety of clichés. Expressions like ‘not to worry’, ‘don’t rock the boat’, ‘let the dog see the rabbit’, came to him continually, as if he were aspiring after a way of life which he only imperfectly understood, and these were the offerings that would buy him in. Some expressions, Avery remarked, were out of date.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Even in these first few days, it had become apparent that Leiser looked to Haldane as an ailing man looks to his doctor; a sinner to his priest. There was something terrible about a man who derived his strength from such a sickly body. Haldane affected to ignore him. He adhered stubbornly to the habits of his private life. He never failed to complete his crossword. A case of burgundy was delivered from the town, half-bottles, and he drank one alone at each meal while they listened to the tapes. So complete, indeed, was his withdrawal that one might have thought him revolted by the man’s proximity. Yet the more elusive, the more aloof Haldane became, the more surely he drew Leiser after him. Leiser, by some obscure standards of his own, had cast him as the English gentleman, and whatever Haldane did or said only served, in the eyes of the other, to fortify him in the part.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“It was mid-afternoon, a slate sky behind the plane trees. The smoke rose from the North Oxford chimneys in ponderous columns like proof of a virtuous sacrifice. The houses were of a modest stateliness; romantic hulls redecked, each according to a different legend. Here the turrets of Avalon, there the carved trellis of a pagoda; between them the monkey-puzzle trees, and the half-hidden washing like butterflies in the wrong season. The houses sat decently in their own gardens, the curtains drawn, first lace and then brocade, petticoats and skirts. It was like a bad water-colour, the dark things drawn too heavy, the sky grey and soiled in the dusk, the paint too worked.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“The marble fireplace was supported by blackamoors of ebony; the light of the gas fire played over the gilded rose-chains which linked their thick ankles. The fireplace came from an age, it might have been the seventeenth century, it might have been the nineteenth, when blackamoors had briefly replaced borzois as the decorative beasts of society; they were quite naked, as a dog might be, and chained with golden roses.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“He seemed a very private man whose speech was exploratory; a man who had been a long time alone and had not reckoned with society; poised, not settled. His accent was good but exclusively foreign, lacking the slur and the elision which escapes even gifted imitators; a voice familiar with its environment, but not at home there.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“What do you want him for, sir?’ He still hadn’t moved. It was very hard to tell what he was thinking. His eyes were fixed on Haldane. ‘To do a job, one job.’ Leiser smiled, as if it all came back to him. He nodded his head towards the window. ‘Over there?’ He meant somewhere beyond the rain. ‘Yes.’ ‘What about getting back?’ ‘The usual rules. It’s up to the man in the field. The war rules.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“In the shortest time his spirit ranged between panic and cringing love, responding with unnatural gratitude to a kind glance or word. It was part of an effeminate dependence upon those whom he deceived. Avery needed desperately to win from the uncaring faces around him the absolution of a trusting smile.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Only on the whitewashed brick walls a few photographs hang, framed in passe-partout, like the photographs in Leclerc’s room. The faces are indistinct, some enlarged, apparently from a passport, taken from the front with both ears showing according to the regulation; some are of women, a few of them attractive, with high square shoulders and long hair after the fashion of the war years. The men are wearing a variety of uniforms; Free French and Poles mingle with their British comrades. Some are fliers. Of the English faces one or two, grown old, still haunt the club.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“Leclerc said, his voice scarcely above a whisper: ‘It began with the networks, didn’t it? Do you remember how the Circus swallowed them up one by one? The Ministry would say: “We’re in danger of duplication on the Polish desks, Leclerc. I’ve decided Control should look after Poland.” When was that? July ’forty-eight. Year after year it’s gone on. Why do you think they patronize your Research Section? Not just for your beautiful files; they’ve got us where they want us, don’t you see? Satellites! Non-operational! It’s a way of putting us to sleep! You know what they call us in Whitehall these days? The Grace and Favour boys.’ There was a long silence. Haldane said, ‘I’m a collator, not an operational man.’ ‘You used to be operational, Adrian.’ ‘So did we all.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War

“When you were reading German, did you touch on the seventeenth century by any chance?’ Smiley inquired hopefully as Avery rose to go. ‘Gryphius, Lohenstein; those people?’ ‘It was a special subject. I’m afraid I didn’t.’ ‘Special,’ muttered Smiley. ‘What a silly word. I suppose they mean extrinsic; it’s a very impertinent notion.”
― John Le Carré, The Looking Glass War