Lost Horizon

by James Hilton

Tertullian’s famous reason

It's a misappropriation.

quia impossibile est.

He was the sort of man who, being used to major hardships, expected minor comforts by way of compensation.

for which thoughtful municipalities provide garden seats.

Haha the sarcasm

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.

Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God.

He did not, in fact, care for excessive striving, and he was bored by mere exploits.

Shangri-La,

“A nice warm trap,” he said, “with a piece of cheese in it, would suit me down to the ground.”

It would be rather less likely than being killed in an English cathedral.”

“And are you so very certain that you are away from it?”

There were moments in life when one opened wide one’s soul just as one might open wide one’s purse if an evening’s entertainment were proving unexpectedly costly but also unexpectedly novel.

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. The war was rather like that. One is fortunate if, as on this occasion, a touch of novelty seasons the unpleasantness.”

that pleasant mingling of physical ease and mental alertness which seemed to him, of all sensations, the most truly civilized.

We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds – even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.

Yet to Conway it did not appear that the Eastern races were abnormally dilatory, but rather that Englishmen and Americans charged about the world in a state of continual and rather preposterous fever heat.

‘Sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.’”

What about ‘Gentlemen v. Lamas’?”

gradual revelation of elegance, of modest and impeccable taste, of harmony so fragrant that it seemed to gratify the eye without arresting it.

exquisite pearl-blue Sung ceramics, paintings in tinted inks preserved for more than a thousand years, lacquers in which the cold and lovely detail of fairyland was not so much depicted as orchestrated.

“We have the files of The Times, Mr. Barnard, up to a few years ago. But only, I regret to say, the London Times.”

Haha

“The jewel has facets,” said the Chinese, “and it is possible that many religions are moderately true.”

of all the arts, that of government has been brought least to perfection.

“Oh, no. Our people would be quite shocked by having to declare that one policy was completely right and another completely wrong.”

Its atmosphere soothed while its mystery stimulated, and the total sensation was agreeable.

He was like a mathematician with an abstruse problem

– worrying over it, but worrying very calmly and impersonally.

a moment which ought, he felt, to be deliriously cheerful, but which would probably be slightly disappointing.

Such is life!

The savor was slender, elusive, and recondite, a ghostly bouquet that haunted rather than lived on the tongue.

“THAT YOU ARE STILL ALIVE, FATHER PERRAULT.”

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.

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.

The airman bearing loads of death to the great cities will not pass our way, and if by chance he should, he may not consider us worth a bomb.”

He did not know whether he had been mad and was now sane, or had been sane for a time and now mad again.

looked at me rather as if I’d suggested writing a life of Gandhi.