[personal profile] fiefoe
The craft:
  • For “getting hold,” in Smiley’s dictionary, read “steal.”
  • If you ever want to get out of Switzerland in a hurry, you pay your bills first.
  • He wondered whether it was the same document that Esterhase and Roy were reading yesterday, and decided on no evidence at all that it was;
  • ...aphorism from Steed-Asprey on the arts of double-cross; something about not looking for perfection, but for advantage,
  • “The other reason you might not have told us, I suppose, is that you burnt them. You burnt the British passports, I mean, not the Swiss ones.”
  • “It is the business of agent runners to turn themselves into legends,” Smiley began,
  • Somehow we had to respond—I don’t think it’s ever realised how much the industry stimulates its own inflation.
  • Gerstmann flew on to Delhi unaware, and he was still unaware when I arrived at Delhi jail to sell him a piece of insurance, as Control called it.
  • “To sum it up, Karla was the proverbial cold-war orphan."
  • Sitting is an eloquent business; any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance.
  • I felt I lacked philosophic repose. Lacked philosophy, if you like.
  • and I was in no clear ideological state myself. I took the line of kinship.
  • ‘in our trade we have only negative vision. In that sense, neither of us has anywhere to go. Both of us when we were young subscribed to great visions—’
__ As for the Foreign Office, the resident clerk was having the vapours and yellow fever all in one.
__ There was background music, which Jerry called the connubial flight of the mosquito.
__ By the by, he is virgin, about eight feet tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge. Do not be alarmed.”
__ a brace of Czech agents

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