Brian

“The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions, which time and mediocrity can resolve.”
― H.R. Trevor-Roper

“Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine: "We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book." That sentence represents 3,040 lives. the book is 411 pages long.”
― Martin Amis

“Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title, and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up of those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition, appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo, to see 'what it is all about,' and to conclude after five minutes that it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a wet August afternoon at Betton Court...

-the beginning of the story "A Neighbor's Landmark”
― M.R. James, A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories

“The weather had just become perfect; it was one of the dozen exquisite days of the English year — days stamped with a purity unknown in climates where fine weather is cheap.”
― Henry James