A Legacy of Spies Quotes

“The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine – just – where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“Did I fuck her? No, I bloody well didn’t. I made mute, frenzied love to her in pitch darkness for six life-altering hours, in an explosion of tension and lust between two bodies that had desired each other from birth and had only the night to live.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“When the truth finally catches up to you, don't be a hero and run.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“The classified cat watches from the kitchen window.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“In any interrogation, denial is the tipping point. Never mind the courtesies that went before. From the moment of denial, things are never going to be the same.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“We were wondering, you see,’ he said in a faraway voice, ‘whether you’d ever considered signing up with us on a more regular basis? People who have worked on the outside for us don’t always fit well on the inside. But in your case, we think you might. We don’t pay a lot, and careers tend to be interrupted. But we do feel it’s an important job, as long as one cares about the end, and not too much about the means.”
― John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“So was it all for England, then?’ he resumed. ‘There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“This was the George I remembered: all-knowing about the frailty of others, while stoically refusing to acknowledge his own.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably, it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. We did not know it then.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“Or put another way: how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more?”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“First, old George persuades Karla to come over to the West. Finds his weak spot, works on it, all credit to him. Debriefs the fellow. Gets him a name and a job in South America. Teaching Russian Studies to Latinos. Resettles him. Nothing too much trouble. Year later the bloody man shoots himself and breaks George’s heart. How the devil did that happen? I said to him: hell’s got into you, George? Karla topped himself. Good luck to him. Always George’s problem, seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“A bottle of slivovitz on the table, half drunk. Jim has produced a second glass and switched off his record player. By the paraffin lamp his craggy face is crooked with pain and age, his uneven back propped against the meagre upholstery. The tortured are a class apart. You can imagine – just – where they’ve been, but never what they’ve brought back.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“I hadn’t clapped eyes on Jim Prideaux since Control had sent him on the abortive mission to Czecho that had cost him a bullet in the back and the unsleeping attention of a Czech torture team. By birth, we were both mongrels: Jim part Czech and part Norman, where I’m Breton. But there the comparison stopped. The Slav in Jim ran deep. As a boy, he had run messages and cut German throats for Czech Resistance. Cambridge may have educated him, but it never tamed him. When he joined the Circus, even Sarratt’s close-combat instructors learned to be wary of him.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“What about Liz?’ ‘Elizabeth Gold?’ – as if he’s forgotten the name, or I have mispronounced it. ‘Elizabeth Gold will be invited to do precisely what comes naturally to her: speak the truth and nothing but the truth. Do you now have all the information you require?’ ‘No.’ ‘I envy you.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“The Stables is a house that lives by night, in unpredictable surges. One minute we’re all bored stiff with waiting, the next there’s a scuffle at the front door and a yell of Shop! and in strolls Jim Prideaux with Windfall’s latest batch of crown jewels. They’ve flown in by microdot or carbon; Jim’s hand-lifted them from a dead letter box in denied territory; they’ve been passed to him personally by Windfall in a one-minute treff in a Prague back alley. Suddenly I’m dashing up and down stairs with telegrams, I’m crouching at my desk alerting Whitehall customers by green phone, the Windfall sisters’ manual typewriters are rattling away, and Ben’s cypher machine is burping through the floorboards. For the next twelve hours we will be breaking up Mundt’s raw material, spreading it across a range of fictitious sources – a bit of signals intelligence here, a telephone or microphone intercept there – and only rarely, to keep the mix alive, the odd highly placed and reliable informant, but all of it under the one magic name of Windfall, for indoctrinated readers only.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“I love you, hear me, Pierrot?’ ‘And I love you, Alec’ – dutifully. And before he shoves me away: ‘Tell us. Just for information. What the fuck’s Windfall?’ ‘Just a Covert source we run. Why?’ ‘Something that ponce Haydon said to me in his cups the other day. Covert’s got this great new source out there, and why’s nobody cutting Joint in on the action? Know what I told him?’ ‘What did you tell him?’ ‘If I was running Covert, I said, and somebody from Joint came up to me and said, who’s your big source? – I’d kick him in the balls.’ ‘And what did Bill say to you?’ ‘Told me to go fuck myself. You know something else I told him?’ ‘Not yet.’ ‘Keep your poofy little hands off George’s wife.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“And of course she marches too.’ ‘As well as runs?’ ‘For Peace, Peter. For peace with a capital P. From Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square, then on to Hyde Park Corner for more of the same. If only Peace were so easy.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“When Control speaks, he trails his tobacco-stained fingertips across his lips as if he is checking them for sores. He is silvery, dapper, ageless and reportedly friendless. He has a wife somewhere but, according to the gossip, she thinks her husband’s in the Coal Board. When he stands, his stooped shoulders come as a surprise. You wait for them to straighten, but they never do. He has been in the job since the mists of time, but I have spoken to him precisely twice and heard him lecture once, and that was on my pass-out day at Sarratt. The voice is knife-thin like the man – nasal, monotonous and irritable as a spoilt child’s. And it doesn’t warm naturally to questions, not even his own. ‘So do we or do we not believe,’ he demands through his fluttering fingertips, ‘that we’re still getting the best material out of Herr bloody Mundt? Is it second pickings? Is it chickenfeed? Is it smoke? And is he leading us up the garden path? George?’ With Control, nobody uses cover names, house rule. Doesn’t care for them. Says they glorify too much. Better to call a spade a bloody shovel than a holy relic.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“Stately, remote, raven-haired Millie McCraig moves among us like a ministering nurse in a field hospital, handing out coffee and Scotch to the needy. Control wants his usual foul green tea, takes one peck at it, leaves the rest. Jim Prideaux chain-smokes his usual foul Russian cigarettes. And George? Looks so withdrawn, so unapproachable, has an air of introspection so forbidding, that it would take a brave man to interrupt his reverie.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“Connie Sachs, in her early twenties already the unchallenged wunderkind of research into Soviet and Satellite intelligence agencies, has recently flounced out of Joint Steering in a huff, straight into George’s waiting arms. She is a brisk, chubby little body, bluestocking, born into the clover, and impatient of lesser minds like mine.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“The Berlin Wall has gone up. Every agent and sub-agent of the Mayflower network has gone missing, been arrested, executed or all three. Karl Riemeck, the heroic doctor of Köpenick, the network’s accidental founder and its inspiration, has himself been mercilessly shot down while attempting to escape to West Berlin on his workman’s bicycle.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“On her arrival by RAF plane at Northolt, Tulip underwent no landing formalities, thereby at no point officially entering the UK. Describing himself as ‘the appointed representative of a Service that is very proud of you’, Dr Meadows made a brief speech of welcome in the VIP reception room in the transit area, and presented her with a bouquet of English roses which appeared to affect her deeply, for she held them silently to her face throughout the journey.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“We cremated her in the name of Tulip Brown, a Russian-born woman of faith who had fled the Communist persecution and settled to a solitary life in England. Brown, it was explained to the retired Orthodox priest unearthed by the ladies of Covert who also arranged the tulips on the coffin, was the name she had given herself out of fear of retribution. The priest, an old Occasional, asked no inconvenient questions.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“And it occurs to me, amid all the turbulent feelings that are wrenching at me, that George Smiley and I are closer than we wish to know in matters of failed love. I dance badly. George, according to his errant wife, refuses to dance at all. And still I have not spoken a word.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“In one chair sits George Smiley, looking the way only George looks when he’s conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“The sheer, unnatural bloody ease of it, for Christ’s sake! Why had everything gone like clockwork when, in any other operation I had ever been involved in, nothing had gone like clockwork even when it had creaked to a successful finish? A Stasi woman officer on the run in a neighbouring police state seething with informants? Czech Security notorious for their ruthlessness and efficiency? Yet far from being scrutinized, followed, listened to and even interrogated, we are gently ushered towards the exit gates? And since when, tell me, had French Intelligence been so bloody immaculate? Torn apart by internal rivalries was more what I’d heard. Incompetent and penetrated from top to bottom, and why does that ring a bell? Yet suddenly they’re grand masters of the art – or are they? And if those were my suspicions, which they were, and becoming more deafening by the minute, what did I propose to do about them? Confess that to Smiley too before I throw in the towel and resign?”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“Jabroche: Bill. My dear friend. My masters in Paris need to be assured that your Monsieur Jacques can hold his own on matters of small farming in France. Haydon: Tell him, Jacques. Guillam: I’m not worried about that, Colonel. Jabroche: Not even in the company of experts? Guillam: I grew up on a French smallholding in Brittany. Haydon: Is Brittany French? You amaze me, Jacques. [Laughter.]”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

“Huddled together in the Trabi in freezing cold, they ate the bread and Wurst, drank the slivovitz, froze and watched the deer go by while Tulip, half asleep with her head on Alec’s shoulder, languidly described her hopes and dreams for her new life with Gustav in England. She would not wish Gustav to go to Eton. She had heard that English boarding schools were run by pederasts like his father. She would prefer a proletarian State school with girls, much sport, not too strict. Gustav would start learning English from the day he arrived. She would see to that. For his birthday she would buy him an English bicycle. She had heard Scotland was beautiful. They would bicycle together in Scotland.”
― John Le Carré, A Legacy of Spies