The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

They have given you a potato. You must have a lover in the kitchen."

All cats are alike in the dark,

Mundt despised technique: he was a man of fact and action. Leamas preferred that.

Only very rarely, as now, going to bed that evening, did he allow himself the dangerous luxury of admitting the great lie he lived.

Stalin said so—" he smiled drily, "it is not fashionable to quote Stalin—but he said once 'Half a million liquidated is a statistic, and one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy.'

Sometimes, because he was a lawyer, he asked them for his own pleasure alone, to demonstrate the discrepancy between evidence and perfective truth.

It is said that men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment.

She was afraid to think of him too much now because she had forgot what he looked like, so she let her mind think of him for brief moments like running her eyes across a faint horizon, and then she would remember some small thing he had said or done, some way he had looked at her, or more often, ignored her.

don't pretend you've fallen in love with me

He nodded to Control and slipped out into the night air. Into the cold.