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The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

John le Carre

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John le Carre
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 19
Died: 2020
Died: December 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Spy
Writer
Sweetwater
Texas
David John Moore Cornwell
David Cornwell
John le Carre
Wise
Pretend
Regarding
Parent
Monsters
Monstrous
Experience
Otherwise
Cheating
Away
Neither
Wholly
Become
Reach
Fades
May
Childhood
Cheat
Ever
However
Plane
Detachment
Parents
Planes
Fade

More quotes by John le Carre

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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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I once heard someone say morality was method. Do you hold with that? I suppose you wouldn't. You would say that morality was vested in the aim, I expect. Difficult to know what one's aims are, that's the trouble, specially if you're British.
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A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.
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People who've had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. If nobody invents you for yourself, nothing is left but to invent yourself for others.
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
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Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.
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In the hands of politicians grand designs achieve nothing but new forms of the old misery.
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
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It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.
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I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.
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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.
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For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.
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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
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The one thing you can bet is that spying is never over. Spying is like the wiring in this building: It's just a question of who takes it over and switches on the lights. It will go on and on and on.
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A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.
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...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.
John le Carre
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Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
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