reading

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”

“The only real difference between old-fashioned steam engines and our newfangled ones is instead of burning wood in our boilers, we use coal, gas, or the godlike powers of the very atoms themselves. That’s right: even with the civilization-ending power of nuclear reactors at our disposal, we still mostly just use them to boil us up some water.”

“Still? That’s amusing. Nero has it too, I understand. It won’t bring him much luck. And it’s no use arguing with you republicans. You refuse to see that one can no more reintroduce republican government at this stage than one can reimpose primitive feelings of chastity on modern wives and husbands. It’s like trying to turn the shadow back on a sundial: it can’t be done.”

“But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.”

“If you want to see and understand people well, you have to know what you are looking at. You have to know what a person is. And this traumatic vignette highlights a central truth about what human beings are: A person is a point of view.”

“Old ladies standing in halls, up and down the streets, asking the same question as if they were one person with one voice: ‘Mailman, you got any mail for me?’ And you felt like screaming, ‘Lady, how the hell do I know who you are or I am or anybody is?’”

“No me gusta el nombre chicharra: ojalá mantuvieran siempre el nombre cícadas, que se usa sólo cuando están en etapa ninfal. Si se llamaran cícadas, su ruido de verano me recordaría las flores violetas de los jacarandás en la costanera del Paraná o las mansiones de piedra blanca con sus escalinatas y sus sauces. Pero así, como chicharras, me recuerdan el calor, la carne podrida, los cortes de electricidad, a los borrachos que miran con ojos ensangrentados desde los bancos de la plaza.”

“The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The toll can be particularly high with our intellectual technologies. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.”

“Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock. I wished sometimes to shake off all thought and feeling, but I learned that there was but one means to overcome the sensation of pain, and that was death—a state which I feared yet did not understand.”

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

“Alcohol in the evening is very enjoyable. Hangovers in the morning are very unpleasant. At some point you have to choose: evenings, or mornings.”