
Sharing thousands of sparkling, moving, entrancing quotations amassed over decades of slow-savoured reading, to refresh the mind and spirit and invigorate flagging thought and flaccid prose. Dive in!
A quotation is not an excerpt. A quotation is a cicada. It is part of its nature never to quiet down. Once having got hold of the air, it does not release it.
Source: Osip Mandelstam, ‘Conversation about Dante’ (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011), p. 108
I have discovered that, with the passing of the years, my ignorance in countless areas… has become increasingly perfected while, at the same time, a lifelong practice of haphazard readings has left me with a sort of commonplace book in whose pages I find my own thoughts put into the words of others.
Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 3
An electric moment
Having a soft spot for foxes, I loved this description of a hair-raising drive careering through the mountain roads of Ithaca in the 1950s, with a fox appearing on the road and showing no concern or fear even with a car-load of men shouting at him. You can imagine...
It will do what it is supposed to do
Listening time: 7 minutes. This marvelous prose-poem comes from a travel book by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who toured a number of Soviet Union states in the 1960s. In Georgia he meets a maker of cognac, and proceeds with a beautiful account of the...
Sheer from the sea
In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Louis Golding sailed passed Ithaca. Minds were on other things than Homer and Odysseus, but this evocative statement about the island, uttered by a sailor on the boat deck, must have contributed to his long-delayed but...
Ancient travellers
Perhaps this is obvious, but it had never occurred to me in any conscious way, and I wonder how far it is true, as I have a romantic image of people navigating by the stars. Will think about this today when we are travelling to Brazil on a night flight. Will think of...
Fortune’s favour
This reminds me of an anonymous Elizabethan verse which I cite from memory:
'Lift up thy heart and courage eke,
Be bold and of good cheer;
For Fortune most...
Cooling the ardour of the Archduke
A wonderful, quirky episode in Orlando: a bizarre game played for hours, days, weeks, by Orlando and the Archduke whose amorous attentions she is trying to rebuff. They play the...
Studying the ways of men
So that's the secret of the fox's cunning - they hide out of sight and study us! Thoreau has dozens of these tiny observations about animals.
See also Mervyn Peake's...
A straight-cut ditch or a meandering brook
Thoreau's comment about education will resonate today with many teachers and students, but I am glad he included the word 'often'. There are many teachers who have (or create) the...
Kingly encouragement
Surely one of the pithiest, funniest and most ebulliently floor-wiping book criticisms in the history of scribbling and patronage. All those long days and late nights scratching away with a...
The impatient shout of a thrush
A few years ago I noted Keats' delight in a thrush in his garden, and so found a kindred joy in Dorothy's writing about the singing thrush, which she...
The law of life
We need water for life, and life and water share a fundamental law: change. They may also share another, apparently contradictory quality, that of being always different and yet somehow...
I love Babur – II
Again, splendid, awkward Babur, the massive mutt picked up by Rory Stewart while trekking across Afghanistan. Usually Rory has to yank, drag and generally cajole the dog into continuing.
Here...
Seek and you shall find … something
A piece of sage advice - you will always find something if you look. But is it what you (thought you) were looking for?
‘There is nothing like looking, if...
On being attentive and polite
If Dorothea, the heroine of George Eliot's Middlemarch, doesn't win you over with her profound and subtle range of human qualities, surely her respectful empathy towards canine feelings is a...
Maps imagined
I love maps and regularly buy them. Here you have a map inside the map-seller's mind, drawing on his knowledge of the world and its ways. If only one could...
In praise of the unknown and unseen – I
The great humanist George Eliot sings the praises of those who act well or kindly in countless unmarked ways, without any song or dance about it.
See a similar example...
How to win a train ticket to Tashkent
This vast novel, full of war and suffering, also has moments of levity. Here we have someone refusing to curtail his right to say whatever he thinks about literature, life...
The cry of justice
Sooner or later, someone, somewhere will cry out against a wrong, no matter how small and despised their voice to begin with, nor how long they have tolerated it previously.
...Maitreya the Laughing Buddha, my master!
布袋和尚
To celebrate World Laughter Day on 2 May, let me share this life-and-laughter embracing quotation from the classical Chinese Expanded Treasure of Laughter, by Feng Menglong (1574-1646). The beautiful...
A waste of an island
Wonderful notion this, from one of the best of Ransome's enchanting children's books. Of course if you land on an island, you should light a fire, or what good is...
Close questioning
I found this marvelous mention of Moishe the Beadle in The Economist’s obituary of Elie Wiesel. Given how much religious and ideology-driven effort has been exerted over centuries to stop...
Immortality by reading
This wonderful quotation was published in El Pais in the days following Umberto Eco’s passing. Wishing you 5,000 years of reading-endowed life, backwards, forwards, or sideways.
‘By the age of 70,...
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