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

“But, of course, we do comprehend, more or less, and we go on eating just the same, just as the knowledge that a child dies of starvation or preventable disease somewhere in the world every few seconds has no effect whatsoever on our ability to bumble happily through our own days. Forgetting these facts, ignoring them and distracting ourselves from them is an essential act of civilized life. ‘Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism”
― 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