The Debt to Pleasure Quotes

“Mere adequacy is never adequate.”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“In all memory there is a degree of fallenness; we are all exiles from our own pasts, just as, on looking up from a book, we discover anew our banishment from the bright worlds of imagination and fantasy. A cross-channel ferry, with its overfilled ashtrays and vomiting children, is as good a place as any to reflect on the angel who stands with a flaming sword in front of the gateway to all our yesterdays.”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“The artist says to the cosmos: All I ask is infinite love-is that so very wrong? And the cosmos doesn't even bother to respond.”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“seduction or librarianship (there being, perhaps, an unacknowledged continuity between the two pursuits, something to do with the essence of cataloguing);”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“In Polish, the language of Poland, all green vegetables are known as włoszczyzna, which means ‘things Italian”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“(It might now be the occasion to remember that for the Romans, a barbarian was someone who wore trousers, had a beard and ate butter.)”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

“curry plays a nostalgic, retrogressive role in British culinary culture; the proliferation of restaurants specializing in it is a consolation prize for the loss of world-historical consequence; we are to be understood as having given away the Empire and received in return, in delayed settlement of that very considerable invoice, the street-corner tandoori house.”
― John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure