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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 863a827 | am lucky that I can make somebody so happy just by saying something. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| e82e651 | you, I did once, years ago, do a little picture of Margaret Thatcher - bless her - a tiny little miniature. Then I pasted it onto a matchbox." Domenica looked puzzled. "Oh?" Angus smiled. "Yes. Then I stood the matchbox outside a mouse hole. The mouse had been bothering me - he had gnawed away at some canvas I had. So I used it as a mouse-scarer. It was more humane than a mouse-trap, you see. The mouse came out and saw this picture of Marga.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c9cc0d0 | Look at what very ordinary people have lost, and think about that for a moment. What has happened to working-class communities in Scotland? To miners, for example. To fishermen? Who? You might well ask. To men and women who work with their hands? Who again? These people are being swept away by globalisation. Swept away. Now they're all so demoralised that they're caught in the culture of permanent sick notes. And who speaks for the young Sc.. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 3cace88 | She really is a huge fan." Ulf closed his eyes. He saw the professor being pursued by a group of his fans, the huge ones struggling to keep up with the thinner, more lithe fans, dropping exhausted and disappointed." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 65c9861 | But sometimes cats just have nasty natures, don't you think? And you can't do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| c9ecc3d | I can't, Tofu," said Bertie. "I can't join the cubs." Tofu was dismissive of Bertie's protestation. "You can't? Why? Is it because you think you'll fail the medical examination? There isn't one. That's the army you're thinking of. The cubs will take anyone - even somebody like you." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| ac4fcfa | I like you when you're algebraic," said Ulf--and immediately regretted it. It was a flirtatious remark--describing somebody as algebraic was undoubtedly to cross a line. You would not normally describe an ordinary friend as algebraic, and then say that you liked her that way. He saw the effect on Anna, and his regret deepened. "Algebraic?" she said, half coyly. "Well, I'm very happy to enter into any equation." | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 30eba7a | In such a way is freedom of thought lost," said Angus Lordie, who had been listening very attentively to Domenica. "By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit." -- | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 57b7480 | We all have Proustian moments, but don't really know about it until we read Proust. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 9ab91bd | Eating with others was different from just talking to them--it was an act of commitment, a recognition of shared humanity. We all share these physical needs, it said; we are brothers and sisters in our vulnerability. | Alexander McCall Smith | ||
| 7a863eb | As Adam Gopnik remarked in The New Yorker, "Post-modernist art is, above all, post-audience art." In" | David Bayles | ||
| 31309d7 | 67-If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry of another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you're given something to do that is time-consuming, .. | exercise mental-failure | Adam Gopnik | |
| cb85751 | The world was once haunted by Titus Oates's self-made epitaph: "I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The poetry of courage is replaced by the poetry of confinement, the art of the endless open channel overtaken by the art of the perpetually retold tale. Our successful withdrawal from the risks of winter makes for a lessening of its intensities. We h.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 37cc54b | There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory ... the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you're suppose to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. .. | status | Adam Gopnik | |
| 596c81a | Commentary by J.-P. Quelin, food critic for Le Monde). [New York and London chefs] are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of cuisine. (This I think is true. When I took my brother to L'Arpege for his birthday we got fourteen -small- courses ... that made even the best of the old cuisine look like sludge.) /289 | criticism cuisine | Adam Gopnik | |
| a06e243 | Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| e1be2aa | It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| fb139d0 | we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 1bbd0f8 | In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of ideological absolutes, and then the explanation in terms of the futility of all explanation. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 0d7ecee | A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it's in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely. That's the mythological lesson of the great choice among the beauties: They are all beautiful--they are goddesses--and yet a man mu.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 3e62008 | The real "crisis" in France in fact is not economic (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) or even cultural (France is in a cyclical slump; it will end) but linguistic. French has diminished as an international language, and this will not end. When people talk about globalization, what they're really saying is that an English-speaking imperium now stretches from Adelaide to Vancouver, and that anyone who is at home in one bit of it is.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 9333421 | The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small--to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways--to get it. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| dbc5723 | There is a book to be written, for instance, on small errors in subtitles. In the Fred Astaire musical Royal Wedding, for instance, the English girl he falls for, played by Sarah Churchill (daughter of Sir Winston), is engaged to an American, whom we never see but who's called Hal--like Falstaff's prince, like a good high Englishman. That English H, though, was completely inaudible to the French translator who did the subtitles, and so thro.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| a88157b | parsley. Vegetables these days are chopped into tiny grass. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| c7c3a2c | Family life is by its nature cocooned, and expatriate family life doubly so. We had many friends and a few intimate ones, but it is in the nature of family rhythm--up too early, asleep too soon--to place you on a margin, and to the essential joy--just the three of us!--was added the essential loneliness, just the three of us. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| c360584 | The great teachers know. The truly great ones don't care whether you believe in their teachings or not. They present a truth, then leave you with yourself to discover your own truth. Adam Gopnik | Mark Wolynn | ||
| f267d02 | Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| e3f9088 | There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights, and what | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f8291e2 | sometimes crazy uncles--from Samuel Johnson to G. K. Chesterton. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f6f21f7 | feeling for normal frailty and for mercy before justice and humanity before dogma, | Adam Gopnik | ||
| bbcaa63 | I understand why people play [soccer]. ... I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking--tidy talking. I suppose you'd have to call it. If you did something good, it was brilliant; something less than brilliant was useless; if all of you were useless together, you were rubbish; and if a person did something brilliant that nonetheless became useless, everyone cried, 'Oh, unlucky!' - 216 | talk-the-game | Adam Gopnik | |
| 8a171a1 | Inogda on ko mne zagliadyvaet i oret, tochno ia glukhoi. Tak s inostrantsami govoriat anglichane, ubezhdennye, chto, esli orat', ikh srazu poimut. Stranno, ia kak budto videl sebia so storony, slovno eto moia dusha otdelilas' ot tela i vosparila k nebesam. S vyshiny ia videl sebia, zhenu i syna, sidevshikh podle brennykh ostankov moego priemnogo ottsa i dumal: v kakoi udivitel'noi sem'e ia vyros i s kakoi neobychnoi sem'ei kogda-nibud' ras.. | John Boyne | ||
| 8413cf7 | There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory ... the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you're suppose to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness. .. | status | Adam Gopnik | |
| bcf31cd | The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| f229910 | There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a counter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Telecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there on the counter in front of her because she can't find them on the computer inventory ... the bus driver who won't let an exhausted pregnant woman out the front door of the bus (you're suppose to exit from the rear) from sheer bloody-mindedness... | status | Adam Gopnik | |
| d339370 | Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics, anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. ~ 219 | soccer | Adam Gopnik | |
| 5581ef4 | Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. /225 | soccer | Adam Gopnik | |
| 034fd8e | In Paris restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Laperouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overlooked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd's biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoit, Aux Assassins) are places.. | Adam Gopnik | ||
| d52ef22 | _Not really liking it much_ is a precondition of art criticism of all kinds. /275 | Adam Gopnik | ||
| afdf539 | I suppose we couldn't realize, or could realize but couldn't accept, that the logic of business is not a logic in that sense. It's not only a narrow consideration of profits and losses, but a larger logic of, well, appetite. To buy something is to assert oneself, and to sell it, for whatever reason, is to collaborate in one's own diminishment. /279 | buy-sell | Adam Gopnik | |
| b137084 | We had moved in a single November night from ideology to politics--from what you _want_ to what you do--with the usual disappointing results. /284 | politics | Adam Gopnik | |
| 88a9eba | J.-P. Quelin: 'The voluptuous cruelty of filling pages is what kills us.' /289 | Adam Gopnik | ||
| 8272e60 | Quote by Robert, a garcon who accepted a 'fat envelope' to leave the Balzar: Anyway it is only in moments of crisis that we find lucidity about ourselves--though only after the crisis is over. Still, that's enough lucidity for anyone. Anyway, it is all the lucidity that life will give you. The crucial thing is that is was _our choice._ We made it. We _chose_ to leave. /293 | crisis life lucidity | Adam Gopnik | |
| bb4a62d | compassion, skepticism, and uncertainty rather than on dogma, | Adam Gopnik |