A decade in quotations: Part 1 (of 10) of the August 2020 Challenge

And Part 1 (of 2) of ‘A life in quotations’: The electronic version

We’ll see how this goes.

In my last post, The Writing Process, I mentioned my attitude towards using quotations in my writing, and how I never seek out ones to use, but instead rely on those I’ve discovered in the course of my reading. 

This is part 1, where I take you through my e-book notes, dating from 2011-present.

As much as I love to rant and rave about the evils of technology, I have many a time waxed lyrical about the splendours of my Kindle. There’s nothing like the real thing – a good old-fashioned hardback or paperback – but when it comes to highlighting passages or making notes, an e-book really makes the gathering process fairly easy. Still, nothing beats the real thing.

On the other hand, when you’ve got hundreds of books and seemingly thousands of highlights, it’s easy to lose track of them, and many of them are probably floating around in the cloud, waiting to be shared. 

There are some absolute gems in there, most of which I’d forgotten about. I spent a couple of fruitful hours scrolling through them all, picking out a few choice nuggets, those I think reflect on my personality, a bit about who I am and what I believe in. It was an arduous but enjoyable undertaking – this is a tiny, miniscule fraction of my collection and I’ve had to be judicious in what I’ve chosen. This could have easily been double or triple the size. These are a mere [carefully cultivated] drop in the ocean.

There are certain inspirational works which are absolutely loaded with wisdom and quotations, and where I’ve got hundreds of highlights. All of those could merit their own posts. This list includes – in my electronic library – Marcus Aurelius, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, Blaise Pascal and Christopher Hitchens.

For whatever reason, I’ve left much of those out and selected merely a choice few. 

I think part 2, when I comb through my journals and check out the notes in all of my actual books will even more of a byzantine endeavour.

 

Herewith my electronic notes and quotations, interspersed with plenty of my own meandering reflections.

The order is generally chronological, from more recent to oldest. I’ve tried to group similarly-themed ideas together. 

A decade in quotations

‘I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge,” because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts.’

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Those who know me best know I love holding a grudge for a long, long time. (it’s not a good thing.) This is where I can take a valuable lesson from my daughter. Toddlers don’t nurse grudges at all.

“All this bullshit about ‘We won’t have schools and kids are gonna learn from home”, I just don’t buy it. And I actually think it’s bad.’ He looked up with a grin. ‘Our kids need to learn how to socially interact. How to smack someone across the face and apologise. And the kid tells ’em, “That hurt! And I feel sad because you smacked me!” We have social norms that kids need to learn.’

Natural Born Learners: Our Incredible Capacity to Learn and How We Can Harness It, Alex Beard (published 2018)

In light of what’s going on in the world, and over the agonizing question facing many about whether or not to open schools…this is, if anything, timely.

On the other hand…

‘If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.’

Ignacio Estrada, quoted in Natural Born Leaders 

‘My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it.

‘I don’t know how to answer this question of different kinds of minds with different kinds of interests–what hooks them on, what makes them interested, how you direct them to become interested. One way is by a kind of force, you have to pass this course, you have to take this examination. It’s a very effective way. Many people go through schools that way and it may be a more effective way. I’m sorry, after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all different kinds of methods, I really don’t know how to do it.’

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman

After however many years of teaching, I’m with Feynman.

‘In Boston there is an old joke about a woman who landed at Logan Airport and asked the taxi driver, “Can you take me someplace where I can get scrod?” He replied, “Gee, that’s the first time I’ve heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.”’

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker

I’m guessing about two of my readers may get this. And it helps if you’re both from the Boston area and an English teacher.

‘Oh, Lord, sometimes I’d like to quit the whole game…and I act cranky and—I don’t mean to, but I get—So darn tired!’

Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis

‘Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.’

Rules of Civility, Amor Towles

Life’s simple pleasures – coffee, books, sport, going for a leisurely walk, cheese, wine…I don’t often ask for much.

‘The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. There is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot’.

E.M. Cioran, quoted in Help! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, Oliver Burkeman

‘Crazy as this might seem, there’s a long tradition of using courageous questions to get us out of our tidy conversational habits. One list of questions was made famous by the novelist Marcel Proust, including ‘What is your most treasured possession?’; ‘What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?’; ‘What is your favourite journey?’; and ‘How would you like to die?’ All of these questions beat ‘What do you do for a living?’

Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World, Tim Harford

I wonder how many current and former students will remember or have been the victim of one of the first questions I often ask: ‘what’s your favourite kind of cheese?’ It catches so many of them off-guard, but it’s amazing how strong the correlation is between good students and those who answer the question in stride without missing a beat, answering ‘oh, blue or perhaps camembert. I’m also partial to a bit of Caerphilly.’

‘Think of that reliable tool of office life – indeed, of life in general – the ‘praise sandwich’. The praise sandwich is a criticism sandwiched between two delicious slices of praise: ‘I think this is excellent work. It would be great if you could [important feedback here]. But overall, as I say, it’s excellent work.’ It’s a good way to avoid alienating everyone who works with you, but the criticism sandwiched between praise may be lost in the larger whole. You say, ‘It’s excellent, but you need to fix… ’ I hear, ‘It is broadly excellent.’ I feel better, but I will not become better.’

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford

Hit ‘em and hit ‘em hard I say.

‘It’s easy to exaggerate our importance in the universe.’ [He] likes to ask his students why they fear death and yet they don’t fear the time before they were born. “There’s a perfect temporal symmetry there—but no one fears the year 1215,” as he put it. Though it would be terrifying to live in 1215, his point is that we don’t inherently fear a world without ourselves in it. What we fear is the world going on without us.’

Robert Proctor, Stanford professor of agnotology, quoted in If Our Bodies Could Talk: A Guide to Operating and Maintaining a Human Body, James Hamblin  

‘Epicurus has a second, connected point to make about the non-scariness of death, which has become known as the ‘argument of symmetry’. Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don’t look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born – which, as far as you were concerned, was just as eternal, and just as much an oblivion?’

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman

Get over yourselves. We’ll all be nothing but dust at some point.

‘We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of our decisions. The more we experience being masters of our own destiny, the more we expect to realise our wishes. This is a vicious circle. In most cases, we have far less control over our lives than we think.

Decide when to make a choice: Don’t make everything in life a situation where you have to choose. That would be mentally exhausting. In most situations, you should fall back on habit and routine. There is nothing wrong with acting in a routine manner. A life without habit and routine would be unbearable.

                

More broadly, we should also recognise the role of chance in human life.’

The Joy of Missing Out: The Art of Self-Restraint in an Age of Excess, Svend Brinkmann

‘Yet it’s a proven fact that most rich people are rich for the simple reason that they were born into a rich family, while most poor people will remain poor throughout their lives simply because they were born into a poor family.’

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari

‘Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?’

‘The employment a man should choose for such a life ought neither to be a laborious nor an unpleasing one; otherwise 'tis to no purpose at all to be retired. And this depends upon every one's liking and humour.’

The Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne 

‘I like that, well before T. S. Eliot expressed himself on the matter, Samuel Butler stated that the severest test of the imagination was naming a cat.’

                

‘It’s because a person has a sense of humor that we feel we can trust them, says Milan Kundera.’

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez

I wish I could take credit for our cat’s unique name - Escherichia coli – but it was my wife the biologist and her cousin who came up with it. And my sense of humour isn’t very good, but I do try my best. Trust me.

"Life is full of its disappointments," observed the Duchess, "and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions. But that, my dear Reginald, becomes more difficult as one grows older. I think it's more generally practised than you imagine. The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. It's only the middle- aged who are really conscious of their limitations—that is why one should be so patient with them. But one never is."

Reginald at the Carlton, The Complete Short Stories of Saki, H.H. Munro

I ask…no, beg for your patience.     

‘Ordinary people think merely how they shall spend their time; a man of any talent tries to use it. The reason why people of limited intellect are apt to be bored is that their intellect is absolutely nothing more than the means by which the motive power of the will is put into force: and whenever there is nothing particular to set the will in motion, it rests, and their intellect takes a holiday, because, equally with the will, it requires something external to bring it into play. The result is an awful stagnation of whatever power a man has--in a word, boredom.’ 

The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: the Wisdom of Life

The next time one of my teenage students says ‘I’m bored!’ (or more often than not, ‘I’m boring!’), I will throw this at them.

All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, ‘schiavo’, from a Venetian dialect. ‘Ciao’, as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean ‘hello’; it means ‘I am your slave’.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Peter Frankopan

For years and years I’ve been signing off on personal emails to many people with ‘ciao.’ And even after reading this, I continue to do so. Don’t read too much into it.

‘Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.’

The Course of Love, Alain de Botton

Love him or hate him, and Alain de Botton does divide opinions, I could devote an entire column to his insights. And he has featured regularly on these pages over the years. Thankfully, almost everything of his I’ve read has been in a non e-book format, sparing you, dear readers, from having to suffer from more of his blathering nonsense. (but just wait for part 2!)

‘PHILINTE. But when we are of the world, we must conform to the outward civilities which custom demands. 

ALCESTE. I deny it. We ought to punish pitilessly that shameful pretence of friendly intercourse. I like a man to be a man, and to show on all occasions the bottom of his heart in his discourse. Let that be the thing to speak, and never let our feelings be hidden beneath vain compliments.’

The Misanthrope, Molière

Would that we could just be brutally honest with everyone we meet. Life would surely be easier, no? There’s another quotation somewhere amongst my notes about how there would be no more friendship in the world if we could read each other’s thoughts.

‘Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart.’

Pensées, Blaise Pascal

Ah, yes, there it is!

‘rara temporum felicitas, ubi sentire quae velis; et quae sentias, dicere licet – it is seldom that we are allowed to think what we like and say what we think.’

Tacitus, quoted in Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World, James Buchan

And there’s more!

‘To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.’

Confucious, quoted in Walden, Henry David Thoreau

If you’re familiar with Black Swan, the Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s influential book on dealing with the totally unexpected, this will ring true. A Black Swan event is something impossible to predict, something like the dissolution of the Soviet Union or September 11.

There is one thing really, really, really driving me crazy right now (well, there are a few things, but one in particular). A lot of people are talking of this current pandemic as a ‘Black Swan event’. Businesses are blaming their economic malaise on this once in a lifetime Black Swan.

This is not, at all, a Black Swan event. Thankfully wiser heads are calling it a White Swan or even a Grey Swan. We knew it was coming, and we know more are coming, so it’s a terrible, lazy excuse to blame being unprepared on this so-called ‘Black Swan’. 

‘I have an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner—let him on any certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled prose and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it . . . How happy such a voyage of conception, what delicious diligent Indolence!’

Keats, quoted in How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto, Tom Hodgkinson

Ah, the life…

‘The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening anywhere in the world at the hour and the second when it happened.’

The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European, Stefan Zweig (published 1942)

On the other hand, technology is allowing me to easily compile this list of quotations more efficiently. If I ever manage to get to a part 2 of this, it will be far more cumbersome and unwieldy. 

‘As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “If we were placed between the bottle and the ham with an equal appetite for drinking and for eating, there would doubtless be no solution but to die of thirst and of hunger.”’

‘After all, none of us is perfect, and daily life brings us into constant collision with our own incompetence and inadequacies.’

Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich, Jason Zweig

‘It has to be said frankly, and I hope not ungenerously, that chacha is not the pleasantest drink in the world and that morning, as I gulped it down, it seemed to me like the stale urine of a Bactrian camel.’

‘She thumped down some bowls of dark soup. In its murk lay lumps of fat and pieces of rhinoceros pizzle.’

‘It is astonishing that anyone should deliberately go to Batumi in the height of summer: the climate is vile, appallingly hot and humid.’

Bread And Ashes: A Walk Through the Mountains of Georgia, Tony Anderson

In 2014, Olya and I went to Georgia for 2+ weeks, in the middle of July. It was blisteringly hot. In Svaneti, as we were returning from a tough trek in the mountains, a woman called to us from her house and offered us chacha. We felt it would be rude to say no. I’ve never had the stale urine of a Bactrian camel, but I’d rather not find out how similar it is to chacha. Chacha is vile.

At Batumi bus station, at 7am, we sat in a rather unkempt, grubby little café for some breakfast, and had kharcho, a spicy beef soup, served with fresh, puffy lavash. It was unbelievably scrumptious, and by far the finest kharcho I’ve ever had. And ridiculously spicy (a good thing for me, less so for poor Olya, who struggled). My first thought was ‘this isn’t exactly the ideal breakfast on a sweltering hot summer morning’, but the unexpectedness is probably what made it so memorable.

Here’s me suffering, drenched in sweat, on an overnight train from Zugdidi to Tbilisi, the air-conditioning broken:

‘If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.’

Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett

I tell myself at least three times a day.

‘I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart.’

‘The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time.‘

Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens

As we will see when (if?) we get to part 2, Hitchens is one of a handful of writers whose list of epic quotations can run into the thousands (and it does; he has an entire book dedicated to his finest, and every one of his books I own is littered with annotations and highlights).

‘Here we can take refuge in Bertrand Russell’s famous remark that even if we could be certain that one of the world’s religions was perfectly true, given the sheer number of conflicting faiths on offer, every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability.’

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris

Not to get into sensitive territory too much, and there are countless religious-themed thoughts I could share, but this is one of my favourite, and for whatever reason, I just find it amusing. 

Parting thoughts

‘I am interested in people who feel starved of the kind of conversation that is not just superficial chat, or gossip, or argument, or professional shop talk. I have no desire to revive the supposedly lost art of conversation, because so much of what passed for conversation in previous centuries was ruled by etiquette, where you said what you were expected to say, flattering the powerful and trying to show your superiority over those you despised. I do however want to discover how other people see the world and what is most important to them, as well as what is important to myself. When two people converse with mutual respect and listen with a real interest in understanding another point of view, when they try to put themselves in the place of another, and to get inside their skin, the world becomes a different place, even if it is only by a minute amount.’

‘Those who talk about remaining young into old age forget how much fear there is in childhood and how much uncertainty in adolescence. The realities of youth and old age are no longer what they used to be.’

‘The quality of a life depends, in part, on how skilfully, how painlessly, how elegantly memories are combined to inspire experiences that together achieve more than their different elements could alone. None of this can be measured in the number of years one has lived.’

The Hidden Pleasures of Life: A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future, Theodore Zeldin