Smiley's People Quotes
"Sometimes people are innocent but the circumstances can make them appear quite otherwise. There was never a golden age. There’s only a golden mean. We have to remember that. Chalk it on our shaving mirrors."
"You should hear them, George, our new masters! You should hear the way they talk about the Circus! I’m their dogs-body, damn it: I know, get it every day! Gibes. Suspicion. Mistrust at every turn, even from Ministers who should know better."
"Think of the effect such a thing would have on morale alone. Would Mostyn here ever have joined the Circus after that kind of notoriety in the press and wherever? Would you, Mostyn?"
"One of the less controversial exercises of the Wise Men, George – one of their first duties – conferred upon them specifically by our masters – enshrined in a jointly drafted charter – was stocktaking."
"No coat-trailing. No honey-traps. No doubles. No stimulated defections. No émigrés. No bugger all."
"Let us not be simplistic please, Lauder. Let us reach things organically."
"Obsession, our new masters were pleased to call it in their findings."
"What utter nonsense," Smiley repeated deliberately.
"Vladimir wasn’t expensive. He wasn’t an indulgence either."
"He has now been murdered. Since we are talking background, that is Vladimir’s."
"We cannot be held responsible for every ex-agent who takes an injudicious nocturnal walk."
"The danger is absolute. It is not yours to make greater or less."
"Danger to all of us who have knowledge of this matter."
"He wanted you and nobody else, sir," said Mostyn earnestly.
"Who's been asking for him?" Smiley insisted gently.
"Vladimir always said to me, if ever anything went wrong, I should go to Villem."
"He’s not here, we’re not hiding him in the attic, we haven’t seen him since Beckie’s christening."
"William’s right out of it, Max," Stella warned, staring straight at Smiley.
Hullo, Max," said Villem. "How you doing, Max? That’s the way, huh?
"That he’s disappeared," Smiley replied quite lightly, at last.
"Vladimir drove down here yesterday by taxi," he explained, still to Stella.
"Vladi is of Beckie the godfather!" he protested with another flourish.
"He was friend of my father! Comrade! In Paris they fight together Bolshevism."
We are soldiers," he declared. "We must try to profit from his courage and example.
"So who have you told this to, William, apart from me?" Smiley asked.
"Stay away, Max. All of you. Whatever happens, however bad it is. He’s grown up."
"I’m chasing phantoms, there is nothing there. A senile General had a dream and died for it."
"It is God’s punishment, she told herself, without too much conviction."
"His Sunday had passed in mysterious tranquillity."
"The room had the atmosphere of a sleazy boudoir."
"You want matches so you can burn my feet?"
"The old fool’s for the shredder, and high time too."
"I never knew you yet do anything without a reason."
"Kirov was a hood, he was newly appointed, but what sort of hood was anybody’s guess."
"Go home, George. Karla won’t give you back your past."
"Max, hear us one more time, it was the Sandman himself who sent Kirov to the émigrés to find the legend."
"Germany was his second nature, even his second soul. In his youth, her literature had been his passion and his discipline."
"He lunched then went to the main Post Office and studied old telephone directories for an hour, much as Ostrakova had done in Paris, though for different reasons."
"In a world of perpetual doubt, reassurance never came amiss."
"Smiley put down his money and added one more false name to the dozens he had used in his lifetime."
"He sipped his whisky, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the light."
"But in one respect Otto was a very serious man. He had a debt to settle."
"He had seen it in the first years of peace, one endless smouldering bomb-site and the survivors tilling the rubble like fields."
"He was going to war, every minute could be his last, but the pains had vanished, her body felt as ready as it had been for Glikman, always, any time."
"Yet happening to take the gym-shoe with him."
"They made some noise, played some jazz. So what? We are musical people here."
"How can I win? he asked himself; alone, restrained by doubt and a sense of decency – how can any of us – against this remorseless fusillade?"
"As he walked around the deck till he found a rusted screwdriver to use as a jemmy."
"He heard a hammering and had thought it was inside her head, till she realised it was the work of a furious neighbour."
"In all the years he had known George, he said later, he had never known him so inward, so intent, so elliptical, so desperate."
"‘Yes, that is of course exactly what he would do, isn’t it? He would call Kirov back under the pretext of a promotion, in order to make sure he really came.’"
"She answered his questions, she was grateful to him, she gave him – without the zest or ‘decoration’ – the same information that she had given to the magician, though he seemed to possess most of it already."
"‘The magician,’ she said once. ‘Dead. My God.’"
"‘Do you know his name really is Ferguson?’ Saul Enderby drawled in that lounging Belgravia cockney which is the final vulgarity of the English upper-class."
"‘Wish I had an enemy, I must say,’ Enderby remarked, turning a few pages. ‘Been looking for one for donkey’s years. Haven’t I, Sam?’"
"‘We all spin the ropes that hang us, right, George?’"
"‘George always bruised easy, know what I mean? You see a lot – your eyes get very painful. George saw too much, maybe.’"
"‘I can’t see that anything else is ultimately of very much importance.’"
"‘You never knew how free you were, George,’ he heard her say. ‘I had to be free for both of us.’"
"The lodge gates opened and she began trembling on purpose, shaking her hands from the wrists as if she had seen a mouse, or a spider, or a naked man aroused for her."
"He comes in a car, Sasha – Sister Beatitude told her once – with a woman, Sasha."
"‘He was so warm,’ she confided to Sister Beatitude in her bit of French. ‘He held me like a friend! Why does the snow make him so fond?’"
"‘My name is Tatiana and I come from the moon,’ she replied."
"‘You should buy yourself brown cycle clips,’ she told him in Russian."
"‘Greetings, Alexandra Borisovna,’ she heard him whisper, all of a flurry, uttering her patronymic as if it were a state secret."
"‘Who gives you the money to pay Felicity-Felicity for my detention here? Who pays Dr Rüedi? Who dictates what questions go into your notebook every week? To whom do you pass my answers which you so meticulously write down?’"
"‘This was my blood, Uncle Anton. I have shed it for you.’"
"‘They’re the same people,’ Alexandra shrieked."
"‘I demand to know where I am. I am a senior Soviet diplomat. I demand to speak to my Ambassador immediately.’"
"‘My name is Kurt Siebel, sir,’ Toby confided in Grigoriev’s ear."
"‘Imagine facing the wrath of Grigorieva twenty-four hours a day in the wastes of outer Siberia,’ he was saying in effect."
"‘Counsellor, since we cannot afford to delay, I must ask you to study the incriminating photographs on the table behind you,’ Smiley said, with the same studied dullness."
"‘Conspiracy has replaced religion!’ Grigoriev moaned."
"‘Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova,’ she said in an infantile voice."
"‘You must be very careful with her.’ A bell was ringing for the end of rest. ‘Sometimes she lives in the dark. Sometimes she sees too much. Both are painful.’"
You are lucky, then," Mother Felicity retorted. "For I do not.
"Questions out of the head are all completely forbidden by my father."
"The people should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change the people."
"I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his."
"Because we owe the caring and the waiting, we owe this vigil over one man's effort to escape the system he has helped create."
"Whatever reservations he might occasionally have about the Western freedom, here, at this border, like most other things, they stopped dead."
"Come for George's sake, he thought; come for mine. Come for all our damn sakes, and be the impossible harvest we have dreamed of for so long."
"It’s like putting all your money on black, thought Guillam, staring out of the window of the café: everything you’ve got in the world, your wife, your unborn child."
George, you won," said Guillam as they walked slowly towards the car. "Did I?" said Smiley. "Yes. Yes, well, I suppose I did.