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Book: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Quotes of Book: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
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  1. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion;
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  2. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting.
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  3. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    Was anyone else mentioned?' 'Esterhase,' Jim snapped, in the same taut tone. 'Bloody man wanted to know how anyone could trust a Hungarian."
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  4. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    he asked, in a more tentative tone, "What's the
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  5. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    there was no future: there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present.
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  6. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    A committee is an animal with four back legs. "But
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  7. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    Bogus Oxford men he could deal with, just as in his time he had known classics masters who had no Greek and parsons who had no divinity. Such men, confronted with proof of their deception, broke down and wept and left, or stayed on half-pay. But men who withheld genuine accomplishment-these were a breed he had not met but he knew already that he did not like them.
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  8. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    The big three hand you the chicken-feed, you hand it to Polyakov, Moscow Centre thinks Toby is all theirs, everyone's served, everyone's content. The only problem arises when it transpires that you've been handing Polyakov the crown jewels and getting Russian chicken-feed in return. If that should turn out to be the case, you're going to need pretty good friends. Like us.
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  9. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies? Who can smell out the fox without running with him?
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  10. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    He was blown, his agents were hanged, and he entered the long middle age of the grounded pro. He did hackwork in London, sometimes for Smiley, ran a few home-based operations, including a network of girlfriends who were not, as the jargon has it, inter-conscious, and when Alleline's crowd took over he was shoved out to grass in Brixton-he supposed because he had the wrong connections, among them Smiley.
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  11. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    That one won't crack, though, Mendel decided with approval; one of your flabby oak trees, Smiley was. Think you could blow him over with one puff, but when it comes to the storm he's the only one left standing at the end of it.
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  12. John le Carré _ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

    . . . he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion . . . .
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