The Honourable Schoolboy Quotes

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Let's die of it before we're too old.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were volcanoes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven't done your job unless you've scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go; for machismo; and because in order to belong you must share.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.” Other”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands; the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“(George Smiley) - I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country's goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole life in terms of conspiracy (p. 588).”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“He wished, quite simply, to rehearse the articles of his creed, and his creed till now had been old George. At Sarratt they have a very worldly and relaxed attitude to the motives of a fieldman, and no patience at all for the fiery-eyed zealot who grinds his teeth and says, “I hate Communism.” If he hates it that much, they argue, he’s most likely half-way in love with it already. What they really like—and what Jerry possessed, what he was, in effect—was the fellow who hadn’t a lot of time for flannel but loved the service and knew—though God forbid he should make a fuss of it—that we were right. We being a necessarily flexible notion, but to Jerry it meant George and that was that.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“I know what you mean. But I think it safer to stay with institutions, if you don’t mind. In that way we are spared the embarrassment of personalities. After all, that’s what institutions are for, isn’t it?”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Life’s byways, I always maintain, are even stranger than life’s highways”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“After a while, even the best stories grow cold.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.   —W. H. AUDEN”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“I honestly do wonder, without wishing to be morbid, how I reached this present pass. So far as I can ever remember of my youth, I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by, and as I look round me now I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me, but I am one of them. If they stab me in the back, then at least that is the judgment of my peers. As Guillam points out, the letter was essentially from Smiley’s blue period. These days, he says, the old boy is much more himself. Occasionally he and Ann have lunches, and Guillam personally is convinced that they will simply get together one day and that will be that. But George never mentions Westerby. And nor does Guillam, for George’s sake.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“He’d mention that to George one day, if they ever, over a jar, should get back to that sticky little matter of just why we climb the mountain. He’d make a point there—nothing aggressive, not rocking the boat, you understand, sport—about the selfless and devoted way in which we sacrifice other people, such as Luke and Frost and Lizzie. George would have a perfectly good answer, of course. Reasonable. Measured. Apologetic. George saw the bigger picture. Understood the imperatives. Of course he did. He was an owl.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“It’s the Colony’s last day, he decided: Peking has made its proverbial telephone call. “Get out, party over.” The last hotel was closing; he saw the empty Rolls-Royces lying like scrap around the harbour, and the last blue-rinse round-eye matron, laden with her tax-free furs and jewellery, tottering up the gangway of the last cruise ship; the last China-watcher frantically feeding his last miscalculations into the shredder; the looted shops, the empty city waiting like a carcass for the hordes. For a moment it was all one vanishing world; here, Phnom Penh, Saigon, London—a world on loan, with the creditors standing at the door, and Jerry himself, in some unfathomable way, a part of the debt that was owed.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Even without his crying awareness of impending disaster, the disappointment to Guillam would have been scarcely supportable. He had endured a great deal for this moment. Disgrace and exile to Brixton under Haydon, poodling for old George instead of getting back to the field, putting up with George’s obsessive secretiveness, which Guillam privately considered both humiliating and self-defeating—but at least it had been a journey with a destination, till Jerry bloody Westerby, of all people, had robbed him even of that. But to return to London knowing that, for the next twenty-two hours at least, he was leaving Smiley and the Circus to a bunch of wolves, without even the chance to warn him—to Guillam it was the crowning cruelty of a frustrated career, and if blaming Jerry helped, then damn him, he would blame Jerry or anybody else.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“The dining-room was done in smoked glass, polished chrome and leather, with fake Gainsborough ancestors staring at the empty chairs—all the mummies who couldn’t boil eggs, he thought.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“One day, thought Guillam, as he continued listening, one of two things will happen to George. He’ll cease to care or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he’ll be half the operator he is. If he doesn’t, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do. Smiley himself, in a disastrous off-the-record chat to senior officers, had put the names to his dilemma, and Guillam with some embarrassment recalled them to this day. To be inhuman in defence of our humanity, he had said, harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“But Smiley’s room was empty and his bed unslept in, and when Guillam went through his things he was fascinated to see that the old fieldman had gone to the length of sewing false name-tapes in his shirts. That was all he discovered, however.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Jerry had even found a sort of rum comfort in the fact that Bill was one of the clan. He had never seriously doubted, in his vague way, that his country was in a state of irreversible decline, or that his own class was to blame for the mess. “We made Bill,” ran his argument, “so it’s right we should carry the brunt of his betrayal.” Pay, in fact. Pay. What old George was on about.”
― John Le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy