“Knowledge can be like the skin on the surface of the water in a pond, or it can go all the way down to the mud. It can be the tiny tip of the iceberg or the whole hundred percent.”
“Salim,' She said, as if he were in the room. 'I'll have your guts for garters.' I has never heard this before and wondered what garters were. Kat told me later that they are what women used to wear around their thighs to keep their stockings up and they were elasticated. I do not think guts would be a tidy way of doing this.”
“Kat had her arms folded and her hair was tied in what girls call a topknot. Her skinny, bony face jutted out. With her tilted chin and dark eyebrows she seemed sharper, somehow, as if she was more in focus than other people round her, or more real. You couldn't help noticing her, whether you were looking for her or not.
Maybe that's what being pretty meant, I thought. ”
“Lips up, loads of teeth showing = very amused, happy. Lips up, no teeth showing = slightly amused, pleased. Lips pressed together, slightly turned down = not amused, slightly cross, or else puzzled (hard to tell which). Lips pressed together, eyes scrunched up at the same time = very displeased, angry. Lips round like an O and eyes wide open = startled, surprised.”
“The difference between laughing your head off and shouting your head off is that with one you are happy and with the other you are angry.”
“Everyone laughed their heads off, which is not what literally happened but I like the idea of laughing heads becoming detached from bodies through extreme hilarity, so it was a good way to describe things.”
“The world's most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”
“Knowledge is awareness, and to it there are many paths, not all of them paved with logic. But sometimes one is guided through the maze by intuition. One is led by something felt in the wind, something seen in the stars, something that calls from the wasteland to the spirit.
To receive the message, the mental pores must be open. And we white men in striving for our success, in seeking to build a new world from what lies around us, sometimes forget that there are other ways, sometimes forget the Lonesome Gods of the far places, the gods who live on the empty sea, who dance with the dust devils and who wait quietly in the shadows under the cliffs where ancient men once marked their passing with hands.”
“The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into the "lowest-low fertility," where are the children? In a way, you're looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk cafe listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection...the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV package, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.”
“Crisis is routinely identified as a core mechanism of fascism because it short-circuits debate and democratic deliberation. Hence all fascistic movements commit considerable energy to prolonging a heightened state of emergency. Across the West, this was the most glorious boon of World War I.”
“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”
“Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
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