Where Books and Readers Come Together
“And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”
“I thought her very beautiful: still rich in hopes, full of laughter, formed from those very years which I myself had lost, she was like my own youth.”
“So that if happiness, or at least the absence of suffering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek.”
“A common oblivion obliterates everything… The being that I shall be after death has no more reason to remember the man I have been since my birth than the latter to remember what I was before it.”
“And my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck… I cried out with myself as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: ‘How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes.’”
“The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him.”
“They seemed to me now no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament.”
Some “secrets of success”: “rapport, empathy, persuasion, cooperation, and consensus building.”
“How much do I honestly know about him? And he knows even less about me.”
‘You can hear rumors,’ I said, ‘but you can’t know them.’
“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos.”
“I opened my eyes and watched the droplets of water fly up like sparks from a fire.”
“The continual afternoon rain made the pine windbreak dark and heavy. He couldn’t hear the waves at all. There was no wind, just the rain falling straight down from the sky.”
Unlike hundreds of other writers and scholars, Pinker does correctly attribute (the oft-misattributed phrase) “Murder your darlings” to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch found in On the Art of Writing.
“The pianist could speak with both the quickstep of the city and the balladry of the countryside, he was a one-man Book of Songs and Book of History.”
