#ch

Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader. ↗

— James Buchan

#authors #cutting #disgust #effects #favourite

At the heart of banking is a suicidal strategy. Banks take money from the public or each other on call, skim it for their own reward and then lock the rest up in volatile, insecure and illiquid loans that at times they cannot redeem without public aid. ↗

— James Buchan

#banking #banks #call #cannot #each

The death clock is ticking slowly in our breast, and each drop of blood measures its time, and our life is a lingering fever. ↗

— Georg Buchner

#clock #death #drop #each #fever

The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world. ↗

— Georg Buchner

#god #nothingness #world

Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing. ↗

— James Buchan

#cause #classes #collapsing #devil #effect

Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly. ↗

— James Buchan

#chances #conditions #despots #each #east

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission. ↗

— James Buchan

#been #carriages #catastrophic #century #electricity

To illustrate what I mean, an apt dancer may be in thorough unison with the others in that particular group, and at the same time reveal a difference in dancing temperament, rhythm or technique; she may phrase, accentuate or actually interpret differently. ↗

— Florenz Ziegfeld

#actually #apt #dancer #dancing #difference

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. ↗

— Pearl S. Buck

#another #answer #away #being #does

The world survived the fall of the Roman empire and will no doubt outlast our own so much more splendid civilisation. ↗

— James Buchan

#doubt #empire #fall #more #much