John Le Carr - Tumblr Posts
The ghostly formlessness of adolescence was over. Manhood and maturity beckoned, even if he never made the distance. He was in his beloved Switzerland at last, the spiritual home of natural spies.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
He needed his secret St. Moritz with its panelled seclusion, he needed the secret majesty of its brass taps and mahogany-framed mirror, for Pym loved luxury as only those can who have had love taken from them.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Rick just managed to hear, though his face had already acquired the dreamy expression that overcame it at the approach of a direct question.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Sabina spoke of her own life as if it belonged to someone she hated. Her stupid Hungarian father had been shot at the border.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Look again at the photograph. The jaw. The stern unsmiling jaw locking out expression. The little mouth clamped shut and downward to keep its secrets safe. That face cannot discard a single bad memory or experience, because it has nobody to share them with. It is condemned to store every one of them away until the day when it will break from overloading.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
You are hommsexual like all English?
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
“He was hommsexual?” Sabina asked, voicing an ever-ready suspicion as she squirmed more deeply into him. “Not so far as I could see. He had women in regiments.” “He slept only with military women?” “I meant he had large quantities of them. I was using a metaphor.” “I think he was wishing to disguise his hommsexuality. This is normal.”
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
The telephone line to Graz ran through the Soviet Zone. In the evenings Russian technicians could be heard on it, singing drunken Cossack music.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Life is duty, he reflected. It’s just a question of establishing which creditor is asking loudest. Life is paying. Life is seeing people right if it kills you.
John le Carré, A Perfect Spy (via wholesomeobsessive)
It was a Thomas Hardy story that she told, full of casual disasters that seemed to have been timed by an angry God to obtain the maximum of misfortune. And she was Hardy’s woman to go with it: lured forward by her obsession, and only her own destiny left to deal with.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
And when Brammel speaks, his voice is as cold as charity and as late in arriving.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
The path to America was never easy, but Pym has gone the distance, Pym has made it, he is assumed and almost risen into the reddened dark that is repeatedly blasted into whiteness by the floodlights, fireworks and searchlights. The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Pym still has more than a quarter of a century in which to serve his two houses according to the best standards of his omnivorous loyalty. The trained, married, case-hardened, elderly adolescent has still to become a man, though who will ever break the genetic code of when a middle-class Englishman’s adolescence ends and his manhood takes over?
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Escape, till now a fantasy, became his serious aim. A celebrated epileptic at Sunday school acquainted him with his symptoms. Pym waited a day, ran into the kitchen with his eyes rolling, and collapsed dramatically before Mrs. Bannister, shoving his hands into his mouth and writhing for good measure. The doctor, who must have been a rare imbecile, prescribed a laxative.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Axel required to know immediately who she was. “An aristo,” said Pym, still teasing him. “One of ours. Church and spy Establishment, if that means anything to you. Her family’s connections with the Firm go back to William the Conqueror.” “Is she married?” “You know I don’t sleep with married women unless they absolutely insist.” “Is she amusing?” “Axel, we are talking of a lady.” “I mean is she social?” Axel demanded impatiently. “Is she what you call diplomatic geisha? Is she bourgeois? Would Americans like her?” “She’s a top Martha, Axel. I keep telling you. She’s beautiful and rich and frightfully British.”
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
“He was hommsexual?” Sabina asked, voicing an ever-ready suspicion as she squirmed more deeply into him. “Not so far as I could see. He had women in regiments.” “He slept only with military women?” “I meant he had large quantities of them. I was using a metaphor.” “I think he was wishing to disguise his hommsexuality. This is normal.”
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Magnus does not answer him. Magnus is too busy being enthusiastic. He will be enthusiastic for his own funeral and Mary loves him for this as she loves him for too much else, does still. Sometimes his sheer goodness accuses me.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Picture the gloom of it - how it stultified its young and dragged them down, its prohibition of everything exciting that they cared about: from Sunday newspapers to Popery, from psychology to art, from flimsy underwear to high spirits to low spirits, from love to laughter and back again, I don’t think there was a corner of the human state where their disapproval did not fall.
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)
Justice, he was beginning to learn, is only as good as her servants.
John le Carré, A Perfect Spy (via wholesomeobsessive)
Was it the excitement of the chase? Or just the relief of being got out of prison? Or was it the simple prospect of serving his country in a way he’d never dreamed of? Whatever it was, a wave of patriotic fervour swept over him as centuries of British imperial conquest received him. The statues to great admirals and generals, the cannons, redoubts, bastions, the bruised airraid precaution signs directing our stoical defenders to their nearest shelter, the Gurkha-style warriors standing guard with fixed bayonets outside the Governor’s residence, the bobbies in their baggy British uniforms: he was heir to all of it. Even the dismal rows of fish-and-chip shops built into elegant Spanish façades were like a homecoming.
A Delicate Truth by John Le Carre (via wholesomeobsessive)