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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?”
― 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

“His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.”
― 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

“(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

“You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.’ On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington’s honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed?”
― 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

“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

“But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man’s speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Odd,” he remarked finally. “One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery?

For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.”
― 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

“We’re fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man’?”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“The usual snafu. Bad guys are too weak to take the towns, good guys are too crapped out to take the countryside and nobody wants to fight except the Coms. Students ready to set fire to the place soon as they’re no longer exempt from the war, food riots any day now, corruption like there was no tomorrow, no one can live on his salary, fortunes being made and the place bleeding to death. Palace is unreal and the Embassy is a nut-house, more spooks than straight guys and all pretending they’ve got a secret. Want more?”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“In a mad world you keep the fiction going, he thought; stick to it till the bitter end and leave the first bite to him.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Guillam was exhausted. 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

“have”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“recruited by Karla the Russian as a “mole” or “sleeper”—or, in English, agent of penetration”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy