The Night Manager Quotes

“Every man has his personal devil waiting for him somewhere.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackens, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order, and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Guns have their own silence. It is the silence of the dead to come.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Even his Englishness was a well-kept secret.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“The snow is still falling and the worst man in the world is drawn towards it like a man who is contemplating his childhood in the dancing flakes.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“I know their unstinted devotion to the free-market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Promise to build a chap a house, he won't believe you. Threaten to burn his place down, he'll do what you tell him. Fact of life.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life has consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“There is no one better than a good Englishman and no one worse than a bad one. I have observed you. I think you are a good one. Mr Pine, do you know Richard Roper?”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“There's no such thing as a decision. There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over. There's movement or there's stagnation, there's the past that drives you and the regimental chaplain who preaches that only the obedient are free and the women who say you have no feelings, but they can't live without you.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“There's no such thing as a decision. There never was. There's whether you've had a good day or a bad day, there's going forward because there's nothing behind and running because if you stand still any longer you'll fall over.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“When God finished putting together Dicky Roper, He took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Dining alone had always been his particular pleasure, and tonight, in deference to the war’s depletion, Maître Berri had promoted him from his single-seater by the service door to one of the high altars at the window.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Trouble with arms is, everyone thought they were recession-proof, but they’re not. Iran–Iraq was an arms dealers’ charter, and they thought it would never end. Since then it’s been downhill all the way. Too many manufacturers chasing too few wars. Too much loose hardware being dumped on the market. Too much peace about and not enough hard currency. Our Dicky did a bit of the Serbo-Croat thing, of course – Croats via Athens, Serbs via Poland – but the numbers weren’t in his league and there were too many dogs in the hunt. Cuba’s gone dead, so’s South Africa, they make their own. Ireland isn’t worth a light or he’d have done that too. Peru, he’s got a thing going there, supplying the Shining Path boys. And he’s been making a play for the Muslim insurgents in the Southern Philippines, but the North Koreans are in there ahead of him and I’ve a suspicion he’s going to get his nose bloodied again.”
― John le Carré, The Night Manager

“Goodhew wants a summary of Limpet by close of play today. Three thousand words. No adjectives.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“It is as if the twentieth century has emptied its garbage truck of leftover warriors and vanished causes into a camp called Fabergé: American veterans sickened first by war and then by peace; Russian Spetsnaz, trained to guard a country that disappeared while their backs were turned; Frenchmen who still hated de Gaulle for giving away North Africa; the Israeli boy who had known nothing but war, and the Swiss boy who had known nothing but peace; the Englishmen in search of military nobility because their generation somehow missed the fun (if only we could have had a British Vietnam!); the huddle of introspective Germans torn between the guilt of war and its allure.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“I’m not hungry, actually, Frisky.” “I don’t expect anybody is, Tommy. It’s like church. Come on.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“Did you love her? The girl? The woman?” “Yes.” He smiled. “She was my virtue.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“Guns go where the power is,” he announced without preamble. “Armed power’s what keeps the peace. Unarmed power doesn’t last five minutes. First rule of stability.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“His appeal, though roughly made, had fallen on deaf ears. Jonathan had willed himself into the deep, escaper’s sleep of the orphanage.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“She smiles all the time, he thought in alarm. She smiles like a television commercial. She’s afraid we’ll switch her off if she stops smiling.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“They want him, Joe! He’s got his nose into their tent! You know what they say, the Bedouin? Never let a camel’s nose into your tent, because if you do, you get the whole camel.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“The arrival of the cruise guests and their children—the bloodstock English girls of twelve with lolling faces, eating crisps and drawling about gymkhanas, the confident sons with whiplash bodies and the side-of-mouth slur that tells the world to go to hell,”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“Fine white lady, table eight, she some kind o’ fuckin’ caterpillar. Won’t eat nuttin’ but fuckin’ lettuce leaves. Two Mama’s salads, O’Toole!”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“He’s some big company from Nassau that’s losin’ all its money. Man’s as rich as that in recession time, he sure as hell some mighty big crook.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“Yvonne had temporarily supplanted Sophie as the object of his self-distaste.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“He relived his fear of everything: of the mockery when he failed and the envy when he won;”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“But Jonathan could take it. He had always taken it. Deprival was his element.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“Elusive, that’s what he was. Like soap in the bath. You thought you had him, then he’d slipped through your fingers.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager

“Nevertheless, the idea of hate, dignified by Sophie’s murder—of hate turned perhaps to revenge—began to appeal to Jonathan. It was like the promise of a distant great love, and Burr had appointed himself its procurer.”
― John Le Carré, The Night Manager