There may be many, many reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act – a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasonable argument. [...]these escapades had occurred years earlier, in some cases decades earlier, when …
I have always wanted a pug and now I can't have one, because buying a puppy when you are too old to take it for walks is unfair. Brought up with dogs, I am baffled by those who dislike them. They have been domesticated for so long that cohabiting with us is as natural to …
Continue reading Somewhere Towards the End – Diana Athill – Quotes
I think what I loved most about the book was the fact that it reminded me of the power of imagination in everyday life, imagining stories about objects and people. It's been a while since I have been making up stories in my head about people I see on the street and this book gave …
I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary," because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. …
Continue reading The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion – Quotes
Consider, for instance, this sentence, which follows a discussion of a scene in a film by Jean-Luc Godard: 'It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness - rather than the will to power - of its fall into …
Continue reading How to Really Talk About Books You Haven’t Read – Henry Hitchings – Quotes
I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have is stories, night thoughts, the sudden conviction that uncertainty spawns. All I have are ravings, more like. She loved him! I say. She must have loved him! I wait for the kind of sense that dawn makes, when …
were we so blind to the world teetering on the edge that we never straightened up from what we were doing to consider things more clearly or have we lost completely that brute instinct for catastrophe, that sensitivity now buried too deep beneath reason and manners to register but which, once upon a time, was …
I have never really got used to being on earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and other, grimmer skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, off on the far side of the …
Continue reading The Book of Evidence – John Banville – Quotes
I’d lost all faith in everything, except for the certainty that there’s always someone behind our back wanting to deceive us. “The whole business of mobile phones can’t last,’ declared Simei. ‘First, they cost a fortune and only a few can afford them. Second, people will soon discover it isn’t so essential to telephone everyone …
One of the things Barnes mentioned in his book was whether there is any point in describing and discussing art (the old words vs pictures as a method of communicating emotions). I already used words in my review, so now I decided to share with you one picture of each artist mentioned by Barnes. What pictures …
Continue reading Keeping an Eye Open – Julian Barnes – Visual Quotes
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