Neat turns of phrase from le Carré

[cimorene]

[H]is smile went with him everywhere. The typists declared that he slept in it, and hand-washed it at weekends.

-The Honourable Schoolboy

Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young.

-The Honourable Schoolboy

The whole house gently asserted an air of old age; it had a quality, like incense, of courteous but inconsolable sadness.

-The Looking Glass War

Comments

[copracat]

I would like to hang with the typists and listen to their shade.

[cimorene]

The typists seem to coin all the cool slang and everybody else all the way up to the bosses adopts it for their internal monologues. After this explanation the dude is always referred to as having his "hand-washed" or "washable" smile like a Homeric epithet.

[laurajv]

"Forty is a difficult age at which to stay awake, he decided. At twenty or at sixty the body knows what it’s about, but forty is an adolescence where one sleeps to grow up or to stay young."

WORD

[cimorene]

Right?! So relatable.