“Do you think we’re brittle?” she’s been known to ask him. Terrific sense of humour is one thing, but brittle is another. “Of course we’re brittle,” he has answered. “We were born brittle! But seek the bright side: you can’t have much taste unless you’re brittle.” He doesn’t add that Jorrie fails to have much …
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for …
Continue reading The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton – Quotes
The opening of the book contains the ecstasy of a release that every woman who has experienced marriage and motherhood will recognize and many will envy: the opportunity to be alone, to have space and privacy with no demands made upon her, to eat and sleep when she pleased, to have silence and solitude and …
Continue reading Elizabeth and Her German Garden – Elizabeth von Arnim – Quotes
Below are two more quotes I picked from England, England by Julian Barnes I want to post them separately because for me they directly relate to the current situation in UK and EU even though they were published in 1998, when the world was a happier place...or was it? After various attempts at rescue, Europe declined to …
And there was another reason for mistrust. If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering …
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
bookskeptic.com 