Lost Horizon

by James Hilton

Cigars had burned low, and we were beginning to sample the disillusionment that usually afflicts old school friends who have met again as men and found themselves with less in common than they had believed they had.

It was a calm night, starry and very warm, and the sea had a pale, sticky look, like condensed milk.

He was so used to being appealed to for help that mere awareness of someone who would neither ask nor need it was slightly tranquilizing, even amidst the greater perplexities of the future.

The will of God or the lunacy of man – it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things.

“Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know.” “Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940.”

we believe that to govern perfectly it is necessary to avoid governing too much.”

Conway lifted the bowl to his lips and tasted. The savor was slender, elusive, and recondite, a ghostly bouquet that haunted rather than lived on the tongue.

The first quarter-century of your life was doubtless lived under the cloud of being too young for things, while the last quarter-century would normally be shadowed by the still darker cloud of being too old for them; and between those two clouds, what small and narrow sunlight illumines a human lifetime!

we have made no conquest of death or even of decay. All we have done and can sometimes do is to slacken the tempo of this brief interval that is called life.

I can face it, like any other future, but in order to make me keen it must have a point. I’ve sometimes doubted whether life itself has any; and if not, long life must be even more pointless.”

There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything;

one of the first steps toward the clarifying of the mind is to obtain a panorama of one’s own past, and that, like any other view, is more accurate in perspective.

We do as we think fit, guided a little by the example of the past, but still more by our present wisdom, and by our clairvoyance of the future.

all the loveliest things were transient and perishable,

I suppose the truth is that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.”

He was a wanderer between two worlds and must ever wander;

You can’t subject a mere boy to three years of intense physical and emotional stress without tearing something to tatters. People would say, I suppose, that he came through without a scratch. But the scratches were there – on the inside.”