Drawing on thousands of sparkling, moving, entrancing quotations amassed over decades of slow-savoured reading, to refresh the mind and spirit, invigorate tired thought and flaccid prose, and improve the world’s Powerpoint presentations beyond belief. Dive in!
Getting to know your guest
One of several exchanges in which Rory Stewart finds himself being presented as anything but what he is. These introductions took place on his hike across hundreds of kilometres of...
Mind the mine
Rory Stewart walked a long stretch of remoteness in Afghanistan, part of an even longer walk which took him across Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. His account of the Afghan adventure...
Say what you ought
A laughing summary of a lady's capacity to say the right thing at the right moment, just what she ought, no more no less.
The image is simply one I...
An excellent precaution
Long gone the days of bedbugs and room tics, when a lady might think to travel with her own linen. Still, something in the wording suggests a wryness in Jane Austen's...
Call him Titus
Baby Titus, born into a crumbling, rambling pile of stone, with parents of a warmth and tenderness approximately equivalent to the building material of their castle. Here is his mother,...
I shall teach the boy…
The Countess of Gormenghast ponders her personal curriculum for her newborn son, after despatching him to a régime of nanny-care for the first five years of his life. She...
Where every word starts with ‘a’
I love Mandelstam's poetic summary of place, here the city of Sukhum, where he says every word starts with A and you should start your study of Caucasian alphabets.
...
Footing the bullet bill
This is half funny, half awful - your country of birth, having given you the death sentence, hounds you in exile with bills to cover the cost of your eventual...
Argumentative authenticity
You can't help admiring people said to be as authentic as argumentative, including in themselves, and in their art and architecture.
This from a slender, entertaining and masterful look at...
A page per year
Taleb is an erudite and provocative writer, sometimes coming across as intellectually arrogant, though always interesting. Here he shows a healthy sign of self-deprecation which I found entertaining. He's published a...
On living forever
Welcome to the WritingRedux podcast!
This long and winding quotation enchanted me to the extent that I wrote it out by hand some 20-30 times and sent individual copies to...
On hearing Beethoven for the first time
A favourite quotation from a favourite novel, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, reviewed here (soon also available in audio).
In print, it can look dauntingly...
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
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