eilasoles > eilasoles's Quotes

“The ideal way to start interesting research, at least in my view, is to depart from a problem or question to which you do not know the answer.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“Many people have complained that Imagined Communities is a difficult book and especially difficult to translate. The accusation is partly true. But a great deal of the difficulty lies not in the realm of ideas, but in its original polemical stance and its intended audience: the UK intelligentsia. This is why the book contains so many quotations from and allusions to, English poetry, essays, histories, legends, etc., that do not have to be explained to English readers, but which are likely to be unfamiliar to others.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I began to realize something fundamental about field-work: that it is useless to concentrate exclusively on one's 'research project.' One has to be endlessly curious about everything, sharpen one's eyes and ears, and take notes about everything. The experience of strangeness makes all your senses more sensitive than normal, and your attachment to comparison grows deeper. This is why fieldwork is also so useful when you return home. You will have developed habits of observation and comparison that encourage or force you to start noticing that your own culture is just as strange.”
― Benedict Anderson, A Life Beyond Boundaries

“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“You can love more than one person, she said. That's arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You're friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don't really value me? I don't have other friends, I said.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You're stuck in a cave with three other people - all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw - and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must be biologically compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust.”
― Heidi Julavits, The Folded Clock: A Diary

“The failure of India's public institutions to keep pace with the dramatic political, economic and social transformations under way has led to severe gaps in governance. The end result of this disjuncture has been a proliferation of grand corruption - a malaise made up of a diverse array of regulatory, extractive, and political rent-seeking activities.”
― Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics

“How does a hundred-and-eighty-pound man turn into a ninety-pound wolf? Where does the leftover ninety go? Does he park it in the umbrella stand overnight?”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine

“The sale of citizenship is interesting not because it is scandalous or even morally reprehensible, but because it speaks to the very arbitrariness of the concept of belonging to a nation to begin with.”
― Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen