Frederik Strabo

“It’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr. Smiley,” she continued, taking a cigarette from the box; “and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it? The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins. When that happens I am sorry for you.”
― John le Carré, Call for the Dead