Karla's Choice Quotes

“found I didn’t want him to be cold, you see. I’m not religious. Well, you know my feelings on that: it’s one of the unkindnesses of modern life that there’s no excuse for it, any more.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“armoured anti-aircraft train in the Russo-Japanese”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“Always, there is Budapest on the Donau, knocking at the gate of Europe, wanting to come in, and all the pretty palaces of the Rhine and the Seine and the Thames nod their heads and say yes when they mean no. This is the Hungary of Ferenc Róka: the Hungary that will never receive the help it was promised.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“The outcome is what matters, not the will.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“The road was new and starkly industrial, built for”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“salamander lives in the fire because it has forgotten how to live any other way.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“She wanted to say she was going home, but home should not be somewhere that made you afraid.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“No history, in Mitteleuropa. This is the English mistake, to separate then from now. In those places there is only now, and it goes back forever.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“Sometimes if we are artists we surge into the work and we inhabit it or the other way around and then it is gone and we remember nothing, as if it has wiped us clean.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“As I live longer, I’m the more convinced that our valorisation of pain is what makes our world so bleak. We anticipate it, we approve of it, and in doing so we make it. We need a better way.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“There will be people who love the book whatever it is, because their attachment to George Smiley and the Circus is so deep that any slight touch of his hand is enough to bring them joy. There will be others who, for the exact same reason, cannot conceive of reading it, and whose hackles rise at the mention of my absurd hubris. To those people, who will inevitably be given the book by well-meaning family members, and who will have to pretend to be grateful through an instinctive snarl, I can only apologise: I hope that, perhaps in your bath after a particularly dismal day, you pick up the neglected volume on the basis that things can't possibly get any worse, and find that the appetite arrives in the eating. (from the Author's Note)”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“Faceless men in rooms deciding the future of the world, except that they’re not. The world turns and confounds them every time, and you’re left to tidy up. And you don’t even know who’s opposite you across the board.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“the narrow window of action lived in the delay between your first movement and your enemy’s comprehension of the choice. Once they knew what you were doing, you needed to have done it and be doing something”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“Tripods and monoculars, either for birdwatchers or perverts, filled a final display beside the till.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“It’s not the Smiley way. It’s just decency.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice: A Novel of John le Carré's Circus

“The story never changes. Only the clock.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“It does happen,’ Smiley said. ‘You can have too much experience to care any more.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice

“Our side is the one that takes care. That gets people back and knows its own human limit, that some prices are simply too high. Better to lose than become the enemy. That’s why we deserve to win at all. Because we acknowledge limits.”
― Nick Harkaway, Karla's Choice