Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“which even Bashō, at the peak of his powers, would have struggled to describe as convincingly as the menu’s scribe: Warm grilled chicken slices, Smoked bacon, crisp lettuce, And a warm ciabatta roll on a bed of sea-salted fries”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals’ motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.”
― Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

“I have no desire to change things because I am the youngest in my family. I like meeting new people when I travel: these brief and inconsequential encounters have the thrill of beginnings and the sadness of separations.”
― Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

“The eve of a long trip is filled with both exaltation and anxiety, but the day itself is a pure euphoria of action, and anxiety returns in the middle of the trip, at an empty moment, when the exoticism of the setting out has not yet given way to that of going home.”
― Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

“He could have had “dull” tattooed across his forehead, but that would have made him too exciting.”
― Stephen Clarke, A Year in the Merde

“People are islands,' she said. 'They don't really touch. However close they are, they're really quite separate. Even if they've been married for fifty years.”
― Ian Fleming, Casino Royale

“But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Today’s believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“They smiled at the good, and frowned at the bad, and sometimes they were very sad.”
― Ludwig Bemelmans

“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.”
― Carl Sagan

“I can see the war that’s coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy’s diktat, are going to trade out sexting for sending textos pornographiques? It’s”
― Lauren Collins, When in French: Love in a Second Language

“On the plane I had read about a barber taken hostage in Paris, and felt a surge of darkly amused pride. “I’m going to be sixty-five the 22nd of December, I’m about to retire, I don’t want to die with a bullet to the head!” he’d told his captors, according to the news report. “Also, I would prefer that we didn’t tutoyer each other, given my age.”  •”
― Lauren Collins, When in French: Love in a Second Language

“Pamplemousse, it was true, is a pretty great word, especially as a replacement for grapefruit, which, when you think about it, is sort of like saying “poodledog.”
― Lauren Collins, When in French: Love in a Second Language

“Paris . . . is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urgent business requires their presence elsewhere. —”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“An American writer who had come to visit France . . . asked quite naturally what it was that had kept me here so long. . . It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets. —HENRY MILLER ON LIVING IN PARIS”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“The desire to come apart irrevocably will always be as strong as, if not stronger than, the drive to establish oneself.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett

“I drink to plough and fortify a one-track mind and suddenly, briefly, the blood surrenders, shuffles through the old channels, and there is no such thing as a false move.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

“Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

“He called him (it was always a man) a flâneur. “The crowd is his habitat, as air is for the bird or water for the fish,” he wrote. “His passion and his profession is to wed the crowd. . . . To be away from home, but to feel oneself everywhere at home.”
― Elaine Sciolino, The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue des Martyrs

“Yet he continued to return to his core principle: that, in every situation, knowledge was better than ignorance. However agonizing, it was necessary to confront the facts. Only through knowing could a person become strong. The”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women