The Honourable Schoolboy 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.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

A lot of people see doubt as legitimate philosophical posture. They think of themselves in the middle, whereas of course really, they're nowhere.

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.

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.

His master plan was already dead, as his master plans usually were.

Some fieldmen, and particularly the clever ones, take a perverse pride in not knowing the whole picture. Their art consists in the deft handling of loose ends, and stops there stubbornly.

Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

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

The sand of the desert is sodden red, -- Red with the wreck of a square that broke; -- The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England's far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: 'Play up! play up! and play the game!

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.   —W. H. AUDEN

In the breaking of tragic news there is no transition. One minute a concept stands; the next it lies smashed, and for those affected the world has altered irrevocably

(George Smiley) - I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country's goal. The enemy in those days was someone we could point at and read about in the papers. Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole life in terms of conspiracy (p. 588).

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide Late school-boys and sour prentices, Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride, Call country ants to harvest offices ; Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime, Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. Thy beams so reverend, and strong Why shouldst thou think ? I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink, But that I would not lose her sight so long. If her eyes have not blinded thine, Look, and to-morrow late tell me, Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me. Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday, And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay." She's all states, and all princes I ; Nothing else is ; Princes do but play us ; compared to this, All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy. Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we, In that the world's contracted thus ; Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be To warm the world, that's done in warming us. Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ; This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors -- he told them -- appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, Your Eminences: 'Whether it's us, whether it's the opposition, or whether it's the bloody missionaries.

To be inhuman in defence of our humanity . . . harsh in defence of compassion. To be single-minded in defence of our disparity.

Odd,” he remarked finally. “One has no sense of shock. Why is that, Peter? You know me. Why is it?

But hatred was really not an emotion which he could sustain for any length of time, unless it was the obverse side of love.

But we progress, Your Graces. Inexorably we progress. Albeit at the blind man’s speed, as we tap-tap along in the dark.

After a while, even the best stories grow cold.

Life’s byways, I always maintain, are even stranger than life’s highways

If you buy people,’ old Sambo used to say, ‘buy them thoroughly

I know what you mean. But I think it safer to stay with institutions, if you don’t mind. In that way we are spared the embarrassment of personalities. After all, that’s what institutions are for, isn’t it?

You said they were friends, Mr Worthington. Sometimes third parties become intermediaries in these affairs.’ On the word affair, he looked up and found himself staring directly into Peter Worthington’s honest, abject eyes: and for a moment the two masks slipped simultaneously. Was Smiley observing? Or was he being observed?

There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing,” Ann liked to say—it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours—“There is only one reason for doing something. And that’s because you want to.” Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.

Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They

One more consideration also weighed with Smiley, though in his paper he is too gentlemanly to mention it. A lot of ghosts walked in those post-fall days, and one of them was a fear that, buried somewhere in the Circus, lay Bill Haydon's chosen successor: that Bill had brought him on, recruited and educated him against the very day when he himself, one way or another, would fade from the scene. Sam was originally a Haydon nominee. His later victimisation by Haydon could easily have been a put-up job. Who was to say, in that very jumpy atmosphere, that Sam Collins, manoeuvring for readmission, was not the heir elect to Haydon's treachery? For all these reasons George Smiley put on his raincoat and got himself out on the street. Willingly, no doubt - for at heart, he was still a case man. Even his detractors gave him that.

affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant,

Vitaï Lampada There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night — Ten to make and the match to win — A bumping pitch and a blinding light, An hour to play and the last man in. And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat, Or the selfish hope of a season's fame, But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote "Play up! play up! and play the game!" The sand of the desert is sodden red, — Red with the wreck of a square that broke; — The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead, And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England's far, and Honour a name, But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks, "Play up! play up! and play the game!" This is the word that year by year While in her place the School is set Every one of her sons must hear, And none that hears it dare forget. This they all with a joyful mind Bear through life like a torch in flame, And falling fling to the host behind — "Play up! play up! and play the game!

You can’t eat politics, you can’t sell them, and you can’t sleep with them,’ Drake liked to say. So you might as well make money out of them.

Dealing with beautiful women, Your Grace, Craw had warned, is like dealing with known criminals, and the lady you are about to solicit undoubtedly falls within that category.

Close to-night—     Ten to make and the match to win— A bumping pitch and a blinding light,     An hour to play and the last man in. And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,     Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame, But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote—     “Play up! play up! and play the game!”   The sand of the desert is sodden red,—     Red with the wreck of a square that broke;— The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,     And the regiment blind with dust and smoke. The river of death has brimmed his banks,     And England’s far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:     “Play up! play up! and play the game!

Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it's about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

Pity you ran out of steam,’ Ming bawled, to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’t, too much popery. Malraux if you like philosophy, which I don’t. Maugham you can have, and before that it’s back to Conrad. Cheers. Mind my saying something?’ Jerry filled Ming’s glass. ‘Go easy on the Hemingway stuff. All that grace under pressure, love with your balls shot off. They don’t like it, my view. It’s been said.

The usual snafu. Bad guys are too weak to take the towns, good guys are too crapped out to take the countryside and nobody wants to fight except the Coms. Students ready to set fire to the place soon as they’re no longer exempt from the war, food riots any day now, corruption like there was no tomorrow, no one can live on his salary, fortunes being made and the place bleeding to death. Palace is unreal and the Embassy is a nut-house, more spooks than straight guys and all pretending they’ve got a secret. Want more?

to dinner at the Governor’s, but his tai-tai wouldn’t let the chauffeur pick her up.

I refuse to bequeath my life’s work to a parade horse. I’m too vain to be flattered, too old to be ambitious, and I’m ugly as a crab. Percy’s quite the other way and there are enough witty men in Whitehall to prefer his sort to mine.

Talking of others, old men talk about themselves, studying their image in vanished mirrors

We’re fighting for the survival of Reasonable Man’?

In a mad world you keep the fiction going, he thought; stick to it till the bitter end and leave the first bite to him.

She was a huge, crippled, cunning woman, a don’s daughter, a don’s sister, herself some sort of academic, and known to the older hands as Mother Russia.

Happened before Bill had time to get his hoof on it,” she replied.

And good,” added the fieldman in him, for whom all his geese are swans.

she smiled that brimming smile of hers

We’ve got him, George, darling,” Connie kept saying under her breath. “Sure as boots we’ve got the beastly toad.

You alcoholic, dissolute, lecherous, libidinous . . .

The café was modern Swiss antique.

And in his customary corner, the awesome Rocker, Superintendent of Police, ex-Palestine, ex-Kenya, ex-Malaya, ex-Fiji, an implacable warhorse with a beer, one set of slightly reddened knuckles, and a weekend copy of the South China Morning Post.

What are you doing in there, for Christ’s sake?’ Jerry yelled. ‘What goes on?’ Perhaps he’s having a pee, he thought absurdly. Slowly the door opened. Craw’s gravity was awesome. ‘They haven’t come out,’ said Jerry. He had the feeling of not reaching Craw at all. He was going to repeat himself in fact, loudly. He was going to dance about and make a damn scene. So that Craw’s answer, when it finally came, came just in time. ‘To the contrary, my son.’ The old boy took a step forward and Jerry could see the films now, hanging behind him like black wet worms from Craw’s little clothes line, pink pegs holding them in place. ‘To the contrary, sir,’ he said, ‘every frame is a bold and disturbing masterpiece.

sullen and bejewelled.

have

recruited by Karla the Russian as a “mole” or “sleeper”—or, in English, agent of penetration

His mind, as he sucked and spat, was fragmented by drink and mild concussion

Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face, beyond a steady fading of its hopes

Essere inumani in difesa della nostra umanità, spietati in difesa della compassione. Essere monotoni in difesa della nostra varietà.

He typed the eagle’s way, she told them later amid admiring laughter: much circling before he swooped.

Guillam was exhausted. Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

she was muttering, “There, you little devil,” and, “Now where did you get to, you wretch?” not to Smiley or Guillam, of course, but to the documents themselves, for Connie had the affectation of assuming everything was alive and potentially recalcitrant, whether it was Trot her dog or a chair that obstructed her passage, or Moscow Centre, or finally Karla himself.