The Secret Pilgrim Quotes

“Haydon had found his charm again. He could do that at the drop of a hat. He drew you and he repelled you. I remember that exactly. He danced all ways for you, playing your emotions against each other because he had none of his own.”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“We pretend a lot of things aren't there. Or we pretend that other things are more important. That's how we survive.”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“I wished I could make them throw everything over for a flawed and impossible passion, only to see the objective it turn against them, proving there is no reward for love except the experience of loving and nothing to be learned by it except humility.”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim: A George Smiley Novel

“Forgive me. Sometimes an answer can vary with a context, if you follow me”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“By what route the infant Hansen found his way to the Jesuits, the file did not relate. Perhaps the mother converted. Those were dark years still, and if expediency required it, she may have swallowed her Protestant convictions to buy the boy a decent education. Give the Jesuits his soul, she may have reasoned, and they will give him a brain. Or perhaps she sensed in her son from early on the mercurial nature that later ruled his life, and she determined to subordinate him to a stronger religious discipline than was offered by the easy-going Protestants. If so, she was wise.”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Hansen held the answer to the questions I did not know I was asking.”
― John le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“But when from time to time I had tried—for instance in 1963 when I was writing The Looking Glass War—to use cock-up rather than conspiracy as the dramatic outline of my story, I failed to take the reader with me. And in a sense I had only myself to blame, for the book before it had been The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in which conspiracy, and conspiracy only, ruled the plot. First you tell us one thing, now you tell us the opposite was the reader’s justifiable grouse, and I paid a high price for my presumption, even if I never gave up my personal conviction that incompetence, not conspiracy, is what makes the secret world go round.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“At the time of its publication I dedicated The Secret Pilgrim to Alec Guinness, in acknowledgment of his portrayal of George Smiley in the BBC television series, and of a modest friendship that persisted until his recent death. But Guinness was always humbled, as I am, by the gap between the world of the imagination and the world of the real. So he would certainly join me in raising a toast to Bizot, a real man among my cast of imaginary souls.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“For Alec Guinness, with affection and thanks”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Of Smiley, nothing, but that’s the way he wanted it. He hates nostalgia, even if he’s part of other people’s.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“I remembered Smiley’s aphorism about the right people losing the Cold War, and the wrong people winning it,”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“He spoke English as if it were his second language, but it was the only one he had. He spoke in what my son Adrian tells me is called “slur,” which is a slack-mouthed Belgravia cockney that contrives to make mice out of mouse and dispenses almost entirely with the formality of pronouns. It has a vocabulary, naturally: nothing rises but it escalates, no opportunity is without a window, no minor event occurs that is not sensational. It also has a pedantic inaccuracy which is supposed to distinguish it from the unwashed, and explains gems like “as for you and I.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Suddenly, Bradshaw was walking towards me. Stalking? Wading? There is an English walk these days peculiar to men of power, and it is a confection of several things at once. Self-confidence is one, lazy sportiveness another. But there is also menace in it, and impatience, and a leisured arrogance, which comes with the crablike splaying of elbows that give way to nobody, and the boxer’s slouch of the shoulders, and the playful springiness in the knees.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Sometimes you forget how beautiful England is. I passed through Newbury and climbed a winding hill lined with beech trees whose long shadows were cut like trenches into the golden stubble. A smell of cricket fields filled the car. I mounted a crest, castles of white cloud waited to receive me. I must have been thinking of my childhood, I suppose, for I had a sudden urge to drive straight to them, a thing I had often dreamed of as a boy. The car dipped again and fell free, and suddenly a whole valley opened below me, strewn with hamlets, churches, folding fields and forests.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“He stood up abruptly, as if shaking himself free of something that threatened to hold him too tight. Then, very deliberately, he treated himself to a last slow look round the room—not at the students any more, but at the old photographs and trophies of his time, apparently committing them to memory. He was taking leave of his house after he had bequeathed it to his heirs. Then, with a great flurry, he launched a search for his spectacles, before he discovered he was wearing them. Then he drew back his shoulders and marched purposefully to the door as two students hastened to open it for him. “Yes. Well. Goodnight. And thanks. Oh, and tell them to spy on the ozone layer, will you, Ned? It’s dreadfully hot in St. Agnes for the time of year.” He left without looking back.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Yes. Well,” he muttered, as if somehow defending himself against his own assertions. “It’s not only our minds we’re going to have to reconstruct, either. It’s the over-mighty modern State we’ve built for ourselves as a bastion against something that isn’t there any more. We’ve given up far too many freedoms in order to be free. Now we’ve got to take them back.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“The Bear of the future will be whatever we make of him, and the reasons for making something of him are several. The first is common decency. When you’ve helped a man to escape from wrongful imprisonment, the least you can do is provide him with a bowl of soup and the means to take his place in a free world. The second is so obvious it makes me a little intemperate to have to mention it at all. Russia—even Russia alone, shorn of all her conquests and possessions—is a vast country with a vast population in a crucial part of the globe. Do we leave the Bear to rot?—encourage him to become resentful, backward, an over-armed nation outside our camp? Or make a partner of him in a world that’s changing its shape every day?”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“You ask,” he went on, “can we ever trust the Bear? You seem to be amused, yet a bit unseated, by the notion that we can talk to the Russians like human beings and find common cause with them in many fields. I will give you several answers at once. “The first is no, we can never trust the Bear. For one reason, the Bear doesn’t trust himself. The Bear is threatened and the Bear is frightened and the Bear is falling apart. The Bear is disgusted with his past, sick of his present and scared stiff of his future. He often was. The bear is broke, lazy, volatile, incompetent, slippery, dangerously proud, dangerously armed, sometimes brilliant, often ignorant. Without his claws, he’d be just another chaotic member of the Third World. But he isn’t without his claws, not by any means. And he can’t pull his soldiers back from foreign parts overnight, for the good reason that he can’t house them or feed them or employ them, and he doesn’t trust them either. And since this Service is the hired keeper of our national mistrust, we’d be neglecting our duty if we relaxed for one second our watch on the Bear, or on any of his unruly cubs. That’s the first answer.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“I only ever cared about the man,” Smiley announced. And it was typical of his artfulness that he should have opened with a riddle, then waited a moment before setting out to explain it. “I never gave a fig for the ideologies, unless they were mad or evil, I never saw institutions as being worthy of their parts, or policies as much other than excuses for not feeling. Man, not the mass, is what our calling is about. It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn’t notice. It wasn’t weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was just man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we’ve had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they’ve had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves. One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges—why then, Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to have been the loser. History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“I did not remember ever quite inviting Toby to join us, but certainly the staff had been expecting him and the mess waiters had scurried out to greet him as he arrived. In his wide, watered-silk lapels and waistcoat with its Balkan frogging, he looked every inch the Rittmeister.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Sergei Modrian, tried and tested Moscow Centre professional. A charmer, a bit of a dancer, a befriender, a smiling Armenian with a mercury tongue. I had liked him. He had liked me. In our profession, since we may like no one beyond a point, we can forgive a lot for charm.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Of the many callings that comprise the over-world of intelligence, none requires as much devotion as that of the sisterhood of listeners. Men are no good at it. Only women are capable of such passionate espousal of the destiny of others. Condemned to windowless cellars, engulfed by tracks of grey-clad cable and banks of Russian-style tape recorders, they occupy a nether region populated by absent lives which they know more intimately than those of their closest friends or relations. They never see their quarries, never meet them, never touch them or sleep with them. Yet the whole force of their personalities is beamed upon these secret loves. On microphones and telephones they hear them blandish, weep, smoke, eat, argue and couple. They hear them cook, belch, snore and worry. They endure their children, in-laws and babysitters without complaint, as well as their tastes in television. These days, they even ride with them in cars, take them shopping, sit with them in cafés and bingo halls. They are the secret sharers of the trade.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Who the hell is Leonard Burr?” I asked him, still dazed. Peter was astonished that I didn’t know. “Burr? My dear chap. Leonard was Smiley’s Crown Prince for years. George rescued him from a fate worse than death at All Souls.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“If he did it, what’s his motive? The writer doesn’t say. Funny, that. They usually do. Boredom—how about that? Boredom and greed, they’re the only motives left these days. Plus getting even, which is eternal.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“But why, exactly, did George decide that? I wondered. At first it seemed perfectly clear to me. This was Smiley’s soft centre. The old cold warrior was revealing his bleeding heart. Like most things with George—maybe. Or an act of vengeance against Ann perhaps? Or against his other faithless love, the Circus, at a time when the Fifth Floor was locking him out of the house? Gradually I arrived at a slightly different theory, which I may as well pass on to you, since one thing is certain, and that is that George himself will not enlighten us. Listening to the old soldier, Smiley recognised one of those rare moments when the Service could be of real value to real people. For once, the mythology of espionage would be used not to disguise yet another tale of incompetence or betrayal, but to leave an old couple with their dreams. For once, Smiley could look at an intelligence operation and say with absolute confidence that it had worked.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Smiley was Major Nottingham that day and had an impressive card with his photograph to prove it. In my pocket as I read his account of the case lay a similar card in the name of Colonel Ned Ascot. Don’t ask me why Ascot except to note that, in choosing a place-name for my alias, I was yet again unconsciously copying one of Smiley’s little habits.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Dear Sir,” he had written to “The Officer in Charge of Intelligence, Ministry of Defence.” And already, because we are British, his class is branded on the page—if only by the strangely imperious use of capitals so dear to uneducated people. I imagined much effort in the penning, and perhaps a dictionary at the elbow. “I wish, Sir, to Request an Interview with your Staff regarding a Person who has done Special Work for British Intelligence at the highest Level, and whose Name is as Important to my Wife and myself as it may be to your good Selves, and which I am accordingly forbidden to Mention in this Letter.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“And suddenly I realised I had stumbled on page after page of Smiley’s familiar, guarded handwriting, with its sharp little German t’s and twisted Greek e’s, and signed with his legendary symbol. Where he was forced to appear in the drama in person—and you could feel him seeking any means to escape this vulgar ordeal—he referred to himself merely as “D.O.,” short for Duty Officer.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“Smiley could listen with his hooded, sleepy eyes; he could listen by the very inclination of his tubby body, by his stillness and his understanding smile. He could listen because with one exception, which was Ann, his wife, he expected nothing of his fellow souls, criticised nothing, condoned the worst of you long before you had revealed it. He could listen better than a microphone because his mind lit at once upon essentials; he seemed able to spot them before he knew where they were leading.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim

“An intelligence officer is nothing if he has lost the will to listen, and George Smiley, plump, troubled, cuckolded, unassuming, indefatigable George, forever polishing his spectacles on the lining of his tie, puffing to himself and sighing in his perennial distraction, was the best listener of us all.”
― John Le Carré, The Secret Pilgrim