""Meanwhile, you have my totally deniable blessing," said Enderby as they started back towards the house. "Thank you," said Smiley again. "Sorry you've become an instrument of the imperial hypocrisy, but there's rather a lot of it about." "Not at all," said Smiley."

"It wasn't suicide, Toby," Smiley said, still without a glance at him. "It definitely wasn't suicide. I saw the body, believe me. It wasn't a jealous husband either - not unless he was equipped with a Moscow Centre murder weapon."

""Balls, the lot of it. It's death, that's what I'm suffering from. The systematic encroachment of the big D. Is that booze you're toting in that bag?" "Yes. Yes, it is," said Smiley. "Goody. Let's have lots. How's the demon Ann?" On the draining-board, amid a permanent pile of washing-up, he found two glasses, and half filled them. "Flourishing, I gather," he replied."

"Because Karla already had his man in Paris, darling," she explained patiently. "As you are very well aware. That old stickler Pudin, the assistant military attaché. You remember how Karla always loved a soldier. Still does, for all I know."

"The room had the atmosphere of a sleazy boudoir, with a chaise lounge and a pink hand-basin in one corner. "So how's trade, Toby?" Smiley asked. Toby Esterhase had a special smile for that question and a special way of tilting his little palm."

"The plane's descent—and the promise of the renewed chase restored him. There are two Karlas, he reasoned, remembering again the stoic face...There is Karla the professional, so self-possessed that he could allow, if need be, ten years for an operation to bear fruit: in Bill Haydon's case, twenty; Karla the old spy, the pragmatist, ready to trade a dozen losses for one great win. And there is this other Karla, Karla of the human heart after all, of the one great love, the Karla flawed by humanity. I should not be deterred if, in order to defend his weakness, he resorts to the methods of his trade."

"The drawing-pin was where Mostyn said it was, at head height exactly, in the best Sarratt tradition of regularity, its Circus-issue brass head as new and as unmarked as the boy who had put it there. Proceed to the rendezvous, it said, no danger sighted. Moscow Rules, thought Smiley yet again. Moscow, where it could take a fieldman three days to post a letter to a safe address. Moscow, where all minorities are punk."

"On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley's compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla's fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other's frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man's-land."

""Thank you," said Smiley again. And a moment later, with more ease than his portly figure might have suggested him capable of, he had vanished among the trees. But not before the Superintendent had shone the torch full upon his face, a thing he hadn't done till now for reasons of discretion. And taken an intense professional look at the legendary features, if only to tell his grandchildren in his old age: how George Smiley, sometime Chief of the Secret Service, by then retired, had one night come out of the woodwork to peer at some dead foreigner of his who had died in highly nasty circumstances. Not one face at all actually, the Superintendent reflected. Not when it was lit by the torch like that indirectly from below. More your whole range of faces. More your patchwork of different ages, people and endeavours."

""The best I ever met," old Mendel, the Superintendent's one-time superior, had told him over a friendly pint not long ago. Mendel was retired now, like Smiley. But Mendel knew what he was talking about and didn't like Funnies any better than the Superintendent did—interfering la-di-da amateurs most of them, and devious with it. But not Smiley. Smiley was different, Mendel had said. Smiley was the best—simply the best case man Mendel had ever met—and old Mendel knew what he was talking about."

"There was another thing about that face the Superintendent wouldn't easily forget either. Later, he talked to old Mendel about it, as he talked to him later about lots of things. The moisture...It was a thing that happened to the Superintendent himself occasionally and happened to the lads too, even the hardest; it crept up on them and the Superintendent watched for it like a hawk...You just happened to put your hand to your face and find it damp and you wondered what the hell Christ bothered to die for, if He ever died at all."

"The Superintendent called softly to the trees, where his men stood among their blacked-out cars like a next generation waiting for its turn."

"Two seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Smiley from his dubious retirement. The first had for its background Paris, and for a season the boiling month of August, when Parisians by tradition abandon their city to the scalding sunshine and the busloads of packaged tourists."

"The second of the two events that brought George Smiley from his retirement occurred a few weeks after the first, in early autumn of the same year: not in Paris at all, but in the once ancient, free, and Hanseatic city of Hamburg, now almost pounded to death by the thunder of its own prosperity; yet it remains true that nowhere does the summer fade more splendidly than along the gold and orange banks of the Alster, which nobody as yet has drained or filled with concrete."

"The two men had been together for fifteen minutes but this was the Superintendent's first question. For a while Smiley did not seem to hear it, but his silence was not offensive, he had the gift of quiet. Besides, there is a companionship about two men contemplating a corpse."

"But Lacon was talking, not listening: "How's Ann?" he asked vaguely, at the window, stretching his forearms on the sill. "With you and so forth, I trust? Not roaming, is she? God, I hate autumn." "Fine, thank you. How's—" He struggled without success to remember the name of Lacon's wife. "Abandoned me, dammit. Ran off with her pesky riding instructor, blast her. Left me with the children. The girls are farmed out to boarding-schools, thank God." Leaning over his hands, Lacon was staring up at the lightening sky. "Is that Orion up there, stuck like a golf ball between the chimney pots?" he asked."

""Oliver, I wonder if you'd mind finally telling me what I'm doing here," Smiley heard himself suggesting for the third time, hardly above a murmur. Even then, Lacon dithered, pondered, hunted with his eyes, delayed. In Lacon's world, direct questions were the height of bad taste, but direct answers were worse."

"Returning, Smiley approached the pavilion through the trees...earnest moral statements enlivened the flaking green paint. "Punk is destructive. Society does not need it." The assertion caused him a moment's indecision. "Oh, but society does," he wanted to reply; "society is an association of minorities.""

"It was a superior sort of shop with an uncluttered interior and elegant modern chairs for the customers to sit upon; in fact is was so very refined an establishment that is was by no means clear what it sold."

"So many people dead, just to find my name," sighed Stephen."

"5There are very few modern magician who do not declare themselves to be either Strangite or Norrellite, the only notable exception being John Childermass himself. Whenever he is asked he claims to be in some degree both. As this is like claiming to be both a Whig and Tory at the same time, no one understands what he means."

"Drawlight had the strangest feeling. It was something he had felt before when magic was about to happen. Invisible doors seemed to be opening all around him; winds blew on him from far away, bringing scents of woods, moors and bogs."

"England is full of magicians. Hundreds! Thousands perhaps! Norrell refused them. Norrell denied them. Norrell silenced them. but they are magicians nonetheless."

"Bell," he said, "do not wear black. Do not be a widow. Be happy. That is how I wish to think of you."

"Tree speaks to stone; stone speaks to water. It is not so hard as we have supposed. Tell them to read what is written in the sky. Tell them to ask the rain! All of John Uskglass's old alliances are still in place. I am sending messengers to remind the stones and the sky and the rain of their ancient promises."

"Long, long ago, (said the voice,) five hundred years ago or more, on a winter's day at twilight, a young man entered the Church with a young girl with ivy leaves in her hair. There was no one else there but the stones. No one to see him strangle her but the stones. He let her fall dead upon the stones and no one saw but the stones. He was never pnished for his sin because there were no witnesses but the stones. The years went by and whenever the man entered the church and stood among the congregation the stones cried out that this was the man who had murdered the girl with ivy leaves wound into her hair, but no one ever heard us. But it is not too late! We know where he is buried! Pull up the paving stones. Dig up his bones! Let them be snashed with the shovel! Dash his skull against the pillars and brak it!Let the stones have vengeance too! It is not too late! It is not too late!"

"Mr. Norrell, thought confident now that his guest was no great magician or a great magician's servant, was still not much inclined to take Childermass's advice. His invitation to Mr Drawlight to sit down at the breakfast-table and take some chocolate was the coldest sort. But slky silences and black looks had no effect upon Mr Drawlight whatsoever, since he filled up the silences with his own chatter and was too accustoned to black looks to mind them."

"You are a magician, sir?" said Mrs Wintertowne. "I am sorry to hear it. It is a profession I have a particular dislike to." She looked keenly at him as she said so, as though her disapproval might in itself be enough to make him renounce magic instantly and take up some other occupation."

"²The Great church at York is both a cathedral (meaning the church where the throne of the bishop or archbishop is housed) and a minster (meaning a church founded by a missionary in ancient times). It has borne both these names at different periods. In early centuries it was more usualy called the Minster, but nowadays the people of York perfer the term Cathedral as one which elevates their church above those of the nearby towns of Ripon and Beverly. Piopn and Beverly have minsters, but no cathedrals."

"- she bore so many of the signs and disfigurings of extreme old age that she was losing her resemblance to other human beings and began instead to resemble other orders of living creatures. Her arms lay in her lap, so extravagantly spotted with brown that they were like two fish."

"Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic."

"A lovely young Italian girl passed by. Byron tilted his head to a very odd angle, half-closed his eyes and composed his features to suggest that he was about to expire from chronic indigestion. Dr. Greysteel could only suppose that he was treating the young woman to the Byronic profile and the Byronic expression."

"We had better not start building castles in Spain."

"The letters were so full of formal expressions of love and sympathy."

"the old familiar stumps of rotten black teeth."

"It is the constant possibility of accident which erodes ones courage most of all."

"There will never be another war."

"Men could never be so stupid, John! After all this!"

"I’ve been trying…give it a point and purpose when there are none."

"That day it hit me, that I’d been feeling nothing. I’d become entirely callous."

"You can’t feel everyman’s death."

"The War? I shouldn’t think that’s possible."

"His initial excitement had gone long since."

"He wanted to take the body … and dig a grave for him… for would that have been more purposeful, would he have done the first thing of vague since coming into this war?"

"I’m afraid of myself, of what I’m becoming."

"Isn’t that why you read him to try and make some sense of all this?"

"They seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago."

"John says one of the most difficult things is getting used to new faces, new faces."

"Oh it was like meeting ghosts."

"But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly."