Kindle Notes & Highlights
the British are never and nowhere alone, so long as their Empire accompanies them like the proliferating heads on a tapeworm.
Non scholae sed vitae discimus.
There exist, he says, natural, vulgar, and pathological variants of this impulse, in addition to a higher form which is the only genuinely humane type. Its vulgar manifestation lacks all moral value, and can occur even among mindless animals. The less educated one is, the less familiar one is with the qualities of other places in the world: all the stronger is the attraction to the patch of land where one first saw the light of day. In this respect, Greenlanders and Laplanders, Samoyeds and Hottentots must be listed together with the cowherd on his Swiss Alpine meadow.
Genuinely happy people are as rare as Christians who believe in God.
Go to bed with the swine, and you’ll stink all the time.”
She can grasp the most remote etymological nuances at a single glance. But we
to think back from some chewed-over carrion to the vulture that spat it out, or from Vigoleis to Don Quixote.
But who can expect logic from a woman early in the morning, still in bed, with no makeup on, no roof over her head, with a well-trampled mattress beneath her, and next to her a man who wouldn’t even have been able to come up with installments for the chair he was standing on?
Leucadian Cliff
cicisbeo.
Weltschmerz,
I am a collector of nothing at all, not even experiences, and thus not even money.
Those sadists never realized that this pupil of theirs was too cowardly to peek at the work of kids sitting in front of him, behind him, or next to him in class. Copying is a talent we learn not for schoolwork, but for life itself.
If you’re holding hands as you stride toward a Clock Tower, if you know that just an hour later you’ll have night all around you, if the aroma of the slaughterhouse is coursing over the fields, and rats are scuttling across your path, if the mute stars are skewered on the dull firmament of nothingness like the fearful many-faceted eye of the Creator—then you don’t tell lies.
No sooner has the soul started ascending like a lark into the twittering blue, than it reaches the end of its song and plunges back to the fields of common potatoes.
until we are as waterproof as a burkha.
We literally ate our way into Spanish literature, simply by eating less.
Thus our exhibit displayed the false cheek-by-jowl with the genuine, as is fitting for scholarship in general and for the discipline of history in particular.
ones are always whatever you aren’t,
it was nothing but mud, and it would forever remain weighted down by itself.
