EKJ

“Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive. He settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon. When was Bill recruited, and how? Was his right-wing stand at Oxford a pose, or was it paradoxically the state of sin from which Karla summoned him to grace? Ask Karla: pity I didn’t. Ask Jim: I never shall.”
― John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“At this point in his reflections a second cab drew up, squarely at the front entrance, and a tall slow figure cautiously climbed the steps one at a time, like a man who takes care of his heart. “Here’s your Tailor,” Mendel murmured into the telephone.”
― John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Squatting on the bed, he sorted through them, and in that pose, in that dull light, with his long forelock dangling almost to the paper, he might have been lounging in Control’s room, back in the sixties, propounding some wonderfully plausible and quite inoperable piece of skulduggery for England’s greater glory.”
― John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Kept talking about elimination, how he’d backtracked and researched and was nearly there. There were five possibilities, he said. Don’t ask me how he dug them up. ‘It’s one of the top five,’ he says. ‘Five fingers to a hand.’ He gave me a drink and we sat there like a pair of schoolboys making up a code, me and Control. We used Tinker, Tailor. We sat there in the flat putting it together, drinking that cheap Cyprus sherry he always gave. If I couldn’t get out, if there was any fumble after I’d met Stevcek, if I had to go underground, I must get the one word to him, even if I had to go to Prague and chalk it on the Embassy door or ring the Prague resident and yell it at him down the phone. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor. Alleline was Tinker, Haydon was Tailor, Bland was Soldier, and Toby Esterhase was Poorman. We dropped Sailor because it rhymed with Tailor. You were Beggarman,” Jim said.”
― John Le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy