The Honourable Schoolboy
John le Carré
Top 10 Best Quotes
“A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.”
“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
“It is also the pardonable vanity of lonely people everywhere to assume that they have no counterparts.”
“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.”
“A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.”
“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”
“What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?”
“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.”
“Sometimes you do it to save face, thought Jerry, other times you just do it because you haven't done your job unless you've scared yourself to death. Other times again, you go in order to remind yourself that survival is a fluke. But mostly you go because the others go; for machismo; and because in order to belong you must share.”
“We colonise them, Your Graces, we corrupt them, we exploit them, we bomb them, sack their cities, ignore their culture, and confound them with the infinite variety of our religious sects. We are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils as well—the stink of the round-eye is abhorrent to them and we’re too thick even to know it. Yet when we have done our worst, and more than our worst, my sons, we have barely scratched the surface of the Asian smile.” Other”
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Book Keywords:
attachment, viewpoint, home, separation, husbands, desk, homecoming, marriage, married-life, philosophy-of-life, future, caution, lack, circumspection, reporting, present, wives, belonging, life, homelessness, purpose, roots, journalism, anchoring
