Quotes About Author

All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in the dull consciousness of a fool, are poor indeed compared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his Don Quixote in a miserable prison.

Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity.

On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason is Schopenhauer's doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in 1813

Thus music is as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is

Flat muscled and honey coloured. Sea secrets in his eyes. A silver raindrop in his ear.

Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination.

His eyes were polite yet maleficent, as though he was making an effort to be civil to the photographer while plotting to murder his wife.

Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone's sunny grave, haemorrhaging.

They looked cheerful in the photograph, Lenin and his wife. As though they had a new refrigerator in their drawing room, and a down payment on a DDA flat.

It was not entirely his fault that he lived in a society where a man's death could be more profitable than his life had ever been.

Oddly, neglect seemed to have resulted in an accidental release of the spirit.

Indians who valorize their own struggle for independence from British rule and virtually worship those who led it are for the most part strangely opaque to Kashmiris who are fighting for the same thing.

She speaks the most beautiful Urdu.

proposes Nazi-style purges of Indian Muslims.

Kochu Maria, the vinegar-hearted, short-tempered, midget cook, were

Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution.

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right

I also thought about Lady Breckenridge. After a heartbreak last year, I was not in the mood to fall in love with another lady, but Lady Breckenridge had demanded nothing of me.

He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy -- you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success.

checklists seem able to defend anyone, even the experienced, against failure in many more tasks than we realized.

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

I managed to find exactly one scientific study assessing whether or not luck actually does go bad on Friday the thirteenth.