Quote

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.

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
Eye
Active
Cautiously
Moment
None
Interrupting
Moments
Saws
Volcanoes
Asked
Tuning
Novel
Assumed
Wife
Wives
Eyes
Replied
Waiting
Suspicious

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Tyranny is like the electric wiring in an old house. A tyrant dies, the new tyrant takes possession, and all he has to do is drop the switch.
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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
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People like you should be stopped, Mr. Woodrow,' she mused aloud, with a puzzled shake of her wise head. 'You think you're solving the world's problems but actually you're the problem.
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More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.
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Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.
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Gerald Westerby, he told himself. You were present at your birth. You were present at your several marriages and at some of your divorces, and you will certainly be present at your funeral. High time, in our considered view, that you were present at certain other crucial moments in your history.
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I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.
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The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.
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I have a theory which I suspect is rather immoral,' Smiley went on, more lightly. 'Each of us has only a quantum of compassion. That if we lavish our concern on every stray cat, we never get to the centre of things.
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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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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.
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He has the gift of quiet.
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Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived.
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It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D.
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All men are born free: just not for long.
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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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The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.
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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.
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I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
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