Quotes from John Lanchester

A solicitor had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not possible for consciousness to end with the end of life.

mortgage The word literally means "dead pledge," and if it were called that maybe more people would think twice about getting one. It is a classic example of a financial entity that would scare people off if they thought more clearly about what it is: a highly leveraged form of long-term borrowing with regular demands for cash payment against an illiquid asset that is known to be even more illiquid in difficult times.

The only thing worse than when nothing happens is when something does.

I've been writing about measurement a lot this year, because I've found that measuring progress is the only way to drive lasting success.

Customers deposit money in a bank for interest; the bank lends that money to other people at a higher rate of interest. This isn't glamorous or interesting, but then banking is not supposed to resemble base jumping or hip-hop.

As so often with the ideologically committed free marketer, there is no sense that he's actually thinking about what he's saying; he's merely adumbrating arguments towards a conclusion he reached in advance.

The white policeman was a man who gave an impression of heaviness. It wasn't that he was fat, but he sagged as if with a moral or psychic burden; his shoulders sagged, his eyes sagged, his suit sagged and he sat sagged in his chair, as if his disappointments with the world were bearing down on him. He made it clear that Shahid was one of these disappointments.

To give your life is one thing; to do it for a gesture is another; but to do it for a gesture you know is meaningless is a desolate trick of fate.

From his dealings with his mother, Smitty had learned the following truth: the person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.

As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.

Psychology looks at people from the inside. Economics looks at them from the outside.

How does the industry seek to master the risks? Through mathematics. The common-sense version of what sophisticated investors do is diversification, a technique so old it's mentioned in the Talmud, where the strategy advocated is to have a third of your assets in trade, a third in cash and a third in land.

For he that hath, to him shall be given.

concretewaterwindsky

Any flights would be taken business class, since Roger thought that the whole point of having money, if it had to be summed up in a single point, which it couldn't, but if you had to, the whole point of having a bit of money was not to have to fly scum class.

the words lex monetae are really just a polite Latin way of saying, "Suck it, creditors.

There would be a new life, and we would be living a new life. It felt like too much to hope for, but not in a bad way, more the kind of thing you stop yourself thinking about for superstitious reasons, because if you let yourself imagine all the details, it's less likely to happen.

curry plays a nostalgic, retrogressive role in British culinary culture; the proliferation of restaurants specializing in it is a consolation prize for the loss of world-historical consequence; we are to be understood as having given away the Empire and received in return, in delayed settlement of that very considerable invoice, the street-corner tandoori house.

The whole country is a Franciscan monastery compared to Hong Kong. It is like a fusty family firm where the paterfamilias died years ago and they have carried on doing everything in exactly the same way, except somebody installed a 1924 cash register a year or so ago, and since then everybody has been congratulating themselves on how up to date they are. Money is a typhoon, and Britain has so far felt only its first faint breath.

On a more specifically practical level, my main initial impression was to do with the fact that nobody spoke English. Okay, that's an exaggerated way of putting it, a good few people did speak English

But apart from that, I was amazed by how little the language had penetrated the place – given, after all, that we Brits had been running the colony for 150 years. Other groups you might well have expected to speak English were, as a rule, remarkable for being monoglot Cantonese:

It was a mark of how little we had affected the real life of the place. I suppose part of me had thought of Hong Kong as somewhere essentially British, except with a lot of Chinese people scattered about, for local colour.

Having too expensive a currency can cause severe economic problems, which has been the case in many sectors of the Australian economy: the Australian dollar, its strength boosted by COMMODITY wealth, was so highly valued that it devastated the country's retail sector – it was so easy to buy stuff from abroad using super-charged Australian dollars that local shops found it near-impossible to compete.

It was a mystery to Roger how someone he knew so well could be such an impervious, impenetrable stranger.