Dan Sumption > Dan's Quotes

“Siehst Du, Momo", sagte er, "es ist so: Manchmal hat man eine sehr lange Straße vor sich. Man denkt, die ist so schrecklich lang,
die kann man niemals schaffen, denkt man."
Er blickte eine Weile schweigend vor sich hin, dann fuhr er fort:
"Und dann fängt man an, sich zu eilen. Und man eilt sich immer mehr. Jedes Mal, wenn man aufblickt, sieht man, dass es gar nicht weniger wird, was noch vor einem liegt. Und man strengt sich noch mehr an, man kriegt es mit der Angst zu tun, und zum Schluss ist man ganz aus der Puste und kann nicht mehr. Und die Straße liegt immer noch vor einem.
So darf man es nicht machen!"

Er dachte einige Zeit nach. Dann sprach er weiter:
"Man darf nie an die ganze Straße auf einmal denken, verstehst Du? Man muss nur an den nächsten Schritt denken, den nächsten Atemzug, den nächsten Besenstrich. Und immer wieder nur den nächsten."
Wieder hielt er inne und überlegte, ehe er hinzufügte:
"Dann macht es Freude; das ist wichtig, dann macht man seine Sache gut. Und so soll es sein.”
― Michael Ende, Momo

“What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“I don't mean to imply that I have found God in money burning. Actually, what I found there is NOTHING. But somehow I've come to understand, appreciate, gain an awareness of - none of these terms describe the experience properly - that NOTHING is sacred; that to create NOTHING from something, to put NOTHING into a universe made of things, is a sacred action, in and of itself.”
― Jonathan Harris, The Money Burner's Manual: A Guide to Ritual Sacrifice

“You see, Momo,' he [Beppo Roadsweeper] told her one day, 'it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept.'
He gazed silently into space before continuing. 'And then you start to hurry,' he went on. 'You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop - and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it.'
He pondered a while. Then he said, 'You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.'
Again he paused for thought before adding, 'That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be.'
There was another long silence. At last he went on, 'And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. What's more, you aren't out of breath.' He nodded to himself. 'That's important, too,' he concluded.”
― Michael Ende, Momo

“Blake's verse was written in response to a minor slight Klopstock made about the English language. In response, 'English Blake', as he refers to himself, retaliates with what can only be described as English voodoo shit magic. He starts by taking a crap under a poplar tree at Lambeth, but suddenly stands and spins round nine times, much to the disgust of the watching heavens. This act magically constricts Klopstock's bowels, causing him a great deal of pain, until Blake graciously undoes the spell. He then concludes:

If Blake could do this when he rose up from shite
What might he not do if he sat down to write”
― John Higgs, William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever

“Men's deaths are epic, women's deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don't become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don't begin and end on a battlefield.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialised as much as any other person.”
― Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships

“No one was planning to travel light. One brigadier claimed that he needed fifty camels to carry his kit, while General Cotton took 260 for his. Three hundred camels were earmarked to carry the military wine cellar. Even junior officers travelled with as many as forty servants—ranging from cooks and sweepers to bearers and water carriers. According to Major General Nott, who had to work his way up through his career without the benefit of connections, patronage or money and who looked with a jaundiced eye on the rich young officers of the Queen's Regiments, it was already clear that the army was not enforcing proper military austerity. Many of the junior officers were already treating the war as though it were as light-hearted as a hunting trip—indeed one regiment had actually brought its own foxhounds with it to the front.”
― William Dalrymple, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

“Being healthy is an insecure state and does not bode well. It's better to be ill in a quiet way, then at least we know what we're going to die of.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“A strikingly large number of our settlements are oriented to the west and, where circumstances permit, relocate in a westward direction. The east stands for lost causes. Especially at the time that the continent of America was being colonized, it was noticeable that the townships spread to the west even was their eastern districts were falling apart.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“A participant from Zambia, who had listened intently throughout the conference, finally raised her hand at a senior level roundtable. “I have been hearing this expression—‘we need to think outside the box’—for the past 3 days,” she said, reiterating the cliche. “It seems a little strange to me,” the woman continued with bemusement. “In my community we don't thinking boxes.”
― Mary Robinson, Climate Justice: A Man-Made Problem With a Feminist Solution

“Bacon never revolves in real life, open your eyes”
― Barney Farmer, Park By The River

“Father Chantry-Pigg thought it would be wrong to go to Russia, because of condoning the government, which was persecuting Christians. But aunt Dot said if one started not condoning governments, one would have to give up travel altogether, and even remaining in Britain would be pretty difficult.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“Reporters for the B.B.C. have such an extraordinary effect on the people they meet - wherever they go the natives sing. It seems so strange, they never do it when I am travelling, The B.B.C. oughtn't to let them, it spoils the programme. Just when you are hoping for a description of some nice place, everybody suddenly bursts out singing. Even Displaced Persons do it. And singing sounds much the same everywhere, so I switch it off.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“I spent the nine days' voyage partly sketching my Turkish fellow passengers, and partly trying to learn Turkish, and after a time I was able to say, "I would like a shoe-horn," and "See how badly you have ironed my coat, you must do it again." Father Chantry-Pigg said this phrase book was little use, as it had no sentences about the Church being better than Islam...”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“Turks, like Russians and Israelites, seem to want you to see the things that show you how they have got on since Atatürk, or since the Bolshevik revolution, or since they took over Palestine. But how people have got on is actually only interesting to the country which has got on. What foreign visitors care about are the things that were there before they began to get on. I dare say foreigners in England really only want to see Stonehenge, and Roman walls and villas, and the field under which Silchester lies buried, and Norman castles and churches, and the ruins of medieval abbeys, and don't care a bit about Sheffield and Birmingham, or our model farms and new towns and universities and schools and dams and aerodromes and things.”
― Rose Macaulay

“Pigg said he was afraid that old trouts were female. "They can't all be," aunt Dot, who knew natural history and the facts of fish life, corrected him.”
― Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond

“Let's hope I come when you are busy doing something you want to live for. Let us hope I come when you are doing something you would die for, and let's hope that if you kill yourself, you are well over 40 years old, because to kill yourself before age 40 is like murdering a stranger,”
― Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death

“Sex and food and drink and books. You really don’t need much else. Maybe a nice view of the sky. Some shoes that don’t hurt. A bed and roof that won’t leak. Some singing, some music and tempo. A heart full and a soul fed, a head full of dreams and possibilities, what more could you possibly want? What more is there?”
― Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

“Because once you have known Mrs Death there is no unknowing her. You have a mourning that sits inside you. It’s like having a stone in your centre; time smooths the edges like a pebble in a river, but it’s always there – a stone is a stone. If you’ve known loss, you’ll know this stone, you will carry a stone of your own – this pain and weight – and you’ll know what I mean. It is a tattoo under the inside of you that cannot fade or be removed. There is no unknowing the memory that a certain date and time triggers: the smell of the season, the time, the weather . . . We replay it, the jolt, the shock, the finality of death.”
― Salena Godden, Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

“Müntzer exhorted his men, screamed his confidence in God, tried to grab them by the sleeve, I don't know what he did, probably he shed tears, he raged.”
― Éric Vuillard, The War of the Poor

“Concerning the end of Thomas Müntzer, there exists a legend of cowardice with many variants. Müntzer supposedly fled and hid and they found him and turned him over to Count von Mansfield and he was imprisoned in a dungeon and tortured and supposedly he recanted and implored the princes for money and dictated a contrite letter to the inhabitants of Mühlhausen. I don't believe a word of it.”
― Éric Vuillard, The War of the Poor

“And even if you don't give a shit whether or not the Chinese painter of rocks and birds had some mysterious kinship of the soul with the Landgrave of Hesse, fantasies are nonetheless one path to the truth. History is Philomela, and they raped her, or so they say, and cut her tongue, and she whistles at night from deep in the woods.”
― Éric Vuillard, The War of the Poor

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”
― Niels Bohr

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
― Niels Bohr

“There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the "dialect of moss on stone - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses

“Much of life, you will never know what happened to you at all, let alone to anyone else.”
― M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here

“Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself.

It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.”
― M. John Harrison, Things That Never Happen

“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies