A Murder of Quality Quotes

“All men are born free: just not for long.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now i wish i could distinguish them.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“It was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise. They realized that nothing happened when we grew up: no blinding light on the road to Damascus, no sudden feeling of maturity.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Urgent equals ephemeral, and ephemeral equals unimportant.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonimity and his safety. His fear makes him servile - he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. (ch. 9)”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Smiley was not opposed to social distinctions but he liked to make his own.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“He hated to be alone, but people bored him. Being alone was like being tired, but unable to sleep.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“We just don't know what people are like, we can never tell; there isn't any truth about human beings, no formula that meets each one of us.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Shane was horrid to her, always sneering at her because she was honest and simple about the things she liked. Shane hated Stella—I think it was because Stella didn’t want to be a lady of quality. She was quite happy to be herself. That’s what really worried Shane. Shane likes people to compete so that she can make fools of them.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Only adults had nervous breakdowns in those days, so the methods of survival for boys who refused to join the system were animal cunning, “internal immigration” as the Germans call it, or simply getting the hell out. I practised the first two, then opted for the third and took myself to Switzerland.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“It was like feeding a small child. You couldn't over load the spoon.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonymity and his safety. His fear makes him servile—he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. But this fear, this servility, this dependence, had developed in Smiley a perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the wood. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures and their words, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and the broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“I read a story once about a poet who bathed himself in cold fountains so that he could recognise his own existence in the contrast. He had to reassure himself, you see, like a child being hateful to its parents. You might say he had to make the sun shine on him so that he could see his shadow and feel alive.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I’d give my eyes for. Had a very nasty war. Very nasty indeed.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“A fact, once logically arrived at, should not be extended beyond its natural significance.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“There was a fellow called Smiley married Ann Sercomb, Lord Sawley’s cousin. Damned pretty girl, Ann was, and went and married this fellow. Some funny little beggar in the Civil Service with an OBE and a gold watch. Sawley was damned annoyed.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Nobody seems to understand you can’t build society overnight. It takes centuries to make a gentleman.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“It had been one of Smiley’s cardinal principles in research, whether among the incunabula of an obscure poet or the laboriously gathered fragments of intelligence, not to proceed beyond the evidence. A fact, once logically arrived at, should not be extended beyond its natural significance.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“But this fear, this servility, this dependence, had developed in Smiley a perception for the colour of human beings: a swift, feminine sensitivity to their characters and motives. He knew mankind as a huntsman knows his cover, as a fox the wood. For a spy must hunt while he is hunted, and the crowd is his estate. He could collect their gestures and their words, record the interplay of glance and movement, as a huntsman can record the twisted bracken and the broken twig, or as a fox detects the signs of danger.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Smiley himself was one of those solitaries who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country’s enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Miss Brimley, watching him, wished she knew a little more about George Smiley, how much of that diffidence was assumed, how vulnerable he was. “The best,” Adrian had said. “The strongest and the best.” But so many men learnt strength during the war, learnt terrible things, and put aside their knowledge with a shudder when it ended.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“The value of intelligence depends on its breeding.” That was John Landsbury’s favourite dictum. Until you know the pedigree of the information you cannot evaluate a report. Yes, that was what he used to say: “We are not democratic. We close the door on intelligence without parentage.” And she used to reply: “Yes, John, but even the best families had to begin somewhere.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Beneath the dolphin was a tiny scroll on which she could just discern the legend, Regem defendere diem videre. The postmark was Carne, Dorset.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“But it had its beauty, Carne…The Abbey Close in spring…the flamingo figures of boys waiting for the ritual of worship…the ebb and flow of children, like the seasons of the year, and the old men dying among them. He wished he could paint; he would paint the pageant of Carne in the fallow browns of autumn…What a shame, thought Fielding, that a mind so perceptive of beauty had no talent for creation.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Rereading the book now, I find a flawed thriller redeemed by ferocious and quite funny social comment. Most of all I recognise the dankness of those old stone walls that formed the limits of my childhood and left me for the rest of my life with an urge to fight off whatever threatened to enclose me.”
― John Le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“Smiley quickly noticed that he had one quality rare among small men: the quality of openness.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“I used to regard a road sweeper as a person inferior to myself. Now, I rather doubt it. Something is dirty, he makes it clean, and the state of the world is advanced. But I—what have I done? Entrenched a ruling class which is distinguished by neither talent, culture, nor wit; kept alive for one more generation the distinctions of a dead age.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“That’s the trouble today. Like Africa. Nobody seems to understand you can’t build society overnight. It takes centuries to make a gentleman.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“You never heard him play the ’cello. He wasn’t marvellous, but just sometimes he would play so beautifully, with a kind of studious simplicity, that was indescribably good.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

“was from us they learnt the secret of life: that we grow old without growing wise.”
― John le Carré, A Murder of Quality