John le Carré

Quotes

1. “I'm surprised they didn't throw you out with the rest of us,” Smiley said, not very pleasantly. “You had all the qualifications: good at your work, loyal, discreet.”

2. 

   Sometimes as Tarr spoke an extraordinary stillness came over his body as if he were hearing his own voice played back to him.

3. 

   Bill Roach had a feeling he could not describe that Jim lived so precariously on the world's surface that he might at any time fall off into a void; for he feared that Jim was like himself, without a natural gravity to hold him on…Roach appointed himself Jim's regent-guardian…a stand-in replacing Jim's departed friend, whoever that friend might be.

4. 

   Connie began her story like a fairy-tale: “Once upon a time there was a defector called Stanley, way back in sixty-three,” and she applied to it the same spurious logic, part inspiration, part intellectual opportunism, born of a wonderful mind which had never grown up.

5. 

   From the outset of this meeting Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability…His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses. His only fidget was to polish his glasses on the silk lining of his tie, and when he did this his eyes had a soaked, naked look which was embarrassing to those who caught him at it.

6. 

   Coming from a broken home Roach was also a natural watcher. In Roach's observation Jim did not stop at the school buildings, but continued across the sweep to the stable yard. He knew the layout of the place already. Roach decided later that he must have made a reconnaissance or studied maps.

7. 

   Roddy Martindale had no valid claim on Smiley either professionally or socially. He worked on the fleshy side of the Foreign Office and his job consisted of lunching visiting dignitaries whom no one else would have entertained in his woodshed.

8. 

   There was a short pause, illuminated by the vision of Ricki Tarr and his Moscow Centre mistress kneeling side by side in the rear pew of a Baptist church in Hong Kong.

9. 

   Jim Prideaux arrived on a Friday in a rainstorm. The rain rolled like gun-smoke down the brown combes of the Quantocks, then raced across the empty cricket fields into the sandstone of the crumbling facades …Of the whole school only little Bill Roach actually saw Jim arrive, saw the steam belching from the Alvis' bonnet as it wheezed its way down the pitted drive…

10. 

    “You're a good watcher, anyway…No one else spotted me. Gave me a real turn up there, parked on the horizon. Thought you were a juju man. Best watcher in the unit, Bill Roach is, I'll bet. Long as he's got his specs on. What?”

    “Yes,” Roach agreed gratefully, “I am.”

11. 

    Smiley thought: Yes, with Ricki Tarr it could have happened. With Tarr, anything could have happened…In Brixton, they used to call him accident-prone.

12. 

    Unlike Jim Prideaux, Mr. George Smiley was not naturally equipped for hurrying in the rain. Indeed, he might have been the final form for which Bill Roach was the prototype. Small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth.