Amber > Amber's Quotes

“It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“..we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“The service took place on one of those afternoons that occur only in the past.”
― Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus

“And he, despite the gallons of free whisky on offer, was wishing himself violently elsewhere.”
― Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus

“So far Kenzo had managed to avoid being introduced to any of these walking wraiths, but he had a feeling that if he ever did meet his own doppel, he would gang away in the opposite direction as fast as possible.”
― Akimitsu Takagi, The Tattoo Murder Case

“From where is the material for my picturing this scene derived? I search my memory to find a similar place, with similar docks. It takes a while.

But then I remember a trip I took with my family when I was a child. There was a river, and a dock--it's the same dock as the dock I just imagined.

I realize later that, when a new friend described to me his home in Spain, with its "docks," I was picturing this same dock--the dock I saw on my childhood vacation; the dock I "used" already in imagining the novel I am reading.

(How many times have I used this dock?)”
― Peter Mendelsund

“River,' the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all MY rivers: every accessible experience of every river I've seen, swam in, fished, heard, heard ABOUT, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise.”
― Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read

“It was a Tuesday in February. Many my life's most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays. And what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“His favourite word, one for which I have a great deal of time myself as a matter of fact, was "arse." Everyone was more or less an arse most of the time, but I was arsier than just about everyone else in the school. In fact, in my case he would often go further — I was on many occasions a bumptious arse. Before I learned what bumptious actually meant I assumed that it derived from "bum" and believed therefore with great pride that as a bumptious arse I was doubly arsey — twice the arse of ordinary arses.”
― Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

“Your problem is that your shadow is a bit - how should I put it? Faint. I thought this the first time I laid eyes on you, that the shadow you cast on the ground is only half as dark as that of ordinary people… What I think is this: You should give up looking for lost cats and start searching for the other half of your shadow”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel