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He looked up then and paid me what I shall always regard as a marvelously high compliment. ‘Thank God, Rutherford,’ he said, ‘you are capable of imagining things.’
his calm in emergencies, though admired, was often suspected of being too sincere.
What most observers failed to perceive in him was something quite bafflingly simple – a love of quietness, contemplation, and being alone.
there are times in life when the most comfortable thing is to do nothing at all. Things happen to you and you just let them happen.
They would have maddened a collector, but Conway did not collect; he lacked both money and the acquisitive instinct. His liking for Chinese art was an affair of the mind; in a world of increasing noise and hugeness, he turned in private to gentle, precise, and miniature things.
Miss Brinklow, however, was not yet to be sidetracked. “What do the lamas do?” she continued. “They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom.” “But that isn’t DOING anything.” “Then, madam, they do nothing.”
“The jewel has facets,” said the Chinese, “and it is possible that many religions are moderately true.”
There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything; when one took things for granted merely because astonishment would have been as tedious for oneself as for others.
