“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.”

“Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.”

“...also took for granted that secret services were the only real measure of a nations political health, the only real expression of its subconscious.”

“Only Esmeralda was not weeping. Instead she wore that wooden look that whites mistake for churlishenss or indifference. Woodrew knew it was neither. It was familiarity. This how real life is constituted, it said. This is grief and hatred and people hacked to death. This is the everyday we have known since we were born and you Wazungu have not.”

“And your wife, she's in the pink and so on?" His expressions were also boyish. "Very bonny, thank you," said Smiley, trying gallantly to respond in kind.”

“The crowd is bobbing round him and he is part of it, the free people of the earth have taken him among them. He is one with all these grown-up happy children celebrating their independence of things that never held them.”