Margaret MacMillan · 570 pages
Rating: (8.7K votes)
“The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.”
“The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.”
“In the fluid world of 1919, it was possible to dream of great change, or have nightmares about the collapse of order.”
“Wilson agreed reluctantly to their attempts: “I don’t much like to make a compromise with people who aren’t reasonable. They will always believe that, by persisting in their claims, they will be able to obtain more.”
“There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!”
“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
“And whether they were saintly or corrupt, scholars or scarcely able to get through the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, all society’s educated men had the Church to thank for their learning.”
“You could get used to anything if you had to. She knew that now.”
“I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive. You can close your eyes and there will be a light snow falling in New York, and seconds later you are sunning upon a rock in Zacapa, and seconds later still you are surfing through the Bronx on the strength of your own desire. There is no way to find a word to fit around this feeling. Words resist it. Words give it a pattern it does not own. Words put it in time. They freeze what cannot be stopped. Try to describe the taste of a peach. Try to describe it. Feel the rush of sweetness: we make love.”
“Most people would not open a door unless they knew what lay beyond, and even if they opened the door by mistake, they would find an uninteresting room beyond.”
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