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The Looking Glass War QUOTES

The Looking Glass War QUOTES

1 " Do you know what love is? I'll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

2 " There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propelled him forward again to experience as despair compels us to extinction. Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running toward the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

3 " He was witnessing an insane relay race in which each contestant ran faster and longer than the last, arriving nowhere but his own destruction "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

4 " For Heaven’s sake, Adrian, do you think Intelligence consists of unassailable philosophical truths? Does every priest have to prove that Christ was born on Christmas Day? "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

5 " haunted by sad faces which moved through the rain like driftwood in a forgotten harbour. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

6 " The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

7 " knowing perhaps that a weak claim was worse than none. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

8 " Cover,’ he declared, stating a favourite maxim, ‘should never be fabricated but only an extension of the truth. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

9 " The houses sat decently in their own gardens, the curtains drawn, first lace and then brocade, petticoats and skirts. It was like a bad water-colour, the dark things drawn too heavy, the sky grey and soiled in the dusk, the paint too worked. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

10 " Sometimes he was like a man in flight, but running towards the enemy, desperate to feel upon his vanishing body the blows that would prove his being; desperate to imprint upon his sad conformity the mark of real purpose, desperate perhaps, as Leclerc had hinted, to abdicate his conscience in order to discover God. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

11 " Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

12 " Haldane coughed a deep, hopeless cough, like an echo in an old vault. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

13 " Why do they consent or refuse, why do they lie or tell the truth? Why do any of us? "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

14 " When we met him he was a man without love. Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War

15 " One never knows who to talk to in that place; they’re so top-heavy. "

― John le Carré , The Looking Glass War