Home > Work > Call for the Dead (George Smiley #1)
41 " Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective. "
― John le Carré , Call for the Dead (George Smiley #1)
42 " They never understand it, do they? They never know what it costs—the sordid tricks of lying and deceiving, the isolation from ordinary people. They think you can run on their kind of fuel—the flag waving and the music. But you need a different kind of fuel, don't you, when you're alone? You've got to hate, and it needs strength to hate all the time. And what you must love is so remote, so vague when you're not a part of it. "
43 " Thought alone was valueless. You must act for thought to become effective "
44 " a man who could reduce any colour to grey, "
45 " Nor did he let go the advantages of a cloak and dagger man malgré lui, wearing the cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants. "
46 " Thought alone was valueless. "
47 " We seem to be at cross-purposes,’ he said. ‘I send you down to discover why Fennan shot himself. You come back and say he didn’t. We’re not policemen, Smiley.’ ‘No. I sometimes wonder what we are. "
48 " Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism "
49 " Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a relentless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden, half obscure the poky ‘Character dwellings’ which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarfs indefatigably poised over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarfs, suspecting this to be a suburban vice, nor, for the same reason, do they varnish the owls; but wait patiently for the years to endow these treasures with an appearance of weathered antiquity, until one day even the beams on the garage may boast of beetle and woodworm. "
50 " At the centre is a cannibal hut with a thatched roof called ‘The War Memorial Shelter’, erected in 1951 in grateful memory to the fallen of two wars, as a haven for the weary and old. No one seems to have asked what business the weary and old would have in Merries Field, but the spiders have at least found a haven in the roof, and as a sitting-out place for pylon-builders the hut was unusually comfortable. "
51 " He had built a card-house as high as it would go, and he still had cards in his hand. "
52 " malgré "
53 " Her voice was nearly cultured—probably a London undergraduate earning pin-money, thought Guillam. "
54 " Great ability rubbed shoulders with breathtaking incompetence, and when you were new and you never knew which to expect. "
55 " The witnessing of death in war brings a sophistication of its own; "
56 " What dreams did you cherish, Mrs. Fennan, that had so little of the world in them? "
57 " When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. "
58 " intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man. "
59 " Odd little beggar, Smiley was. Reminded Mendel of a fat boy he’d played football with at school. Couldn’t run, couldn’t kick, blind as a bat but played like hell, never satisfied till he’d got himself torn to bits. Used to box, too. Came in wide open swinging his arms about: got himself half killed before the referee stopped it. Clever bloke, too. "
60 " This part of him was bloodless and inhuman—Smiley in this role was the international mercenary of his trade, amoral and without motive beyond that of personal "