"Life is a campus: in a Greenwich Village bookstore, looking for a New Yorker collection, I asked of an earnest-looking assistant where I might find the humour section. Peering over her granny glasses, she enquired, "Humour studies would that be, sir?"

--

Source : The Spectator, January 15, 1994.

Keith Waterhouse

#Glasses Quotes #Bookstores Quotes #Village Quotes

“Can you tell me the difference between a witch and a wizard?Sure, a wizard is what they call you when they want to hire you, and a witch is what they call you when they're getting ready to run you out of town.”

Source : Barbara Hambly (1987). “The Witches of Wenshar”, Del Rey
“And I think that Vietnameese see the United States as a source of markets, as a source of technology and as a source of this balancing power relationship with - against China. They - the Chinese and the Vietnamese have always had a very suspicious relationship of each other.”
“As more people become more intelligent they care less for preachers and more for teachers.”
“Stephen Schlesinger’s Act of Creation tells a dazzling story of the dramatic events that have shaped the world in which we live. Never has a book been more relevant to present dangers and future hopes.”
“...You can't unlearn something, even if you want to. You know what you know.”
“It's strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.”

Source : Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place”, p.148, Vintage
“Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.”
“At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.”

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