#it

My belief, for what it is worth, is that city dwellers cannot understand the world. Insulated from reality by complex and expert systems of provision and police, baffled by fashion and spectacle, city dwellers can distinguish neither the sources of their existence nor the consequences. ↗

— James Buchan

#belief #cannot #city #complex #consequences

One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity. ↗

— James Buchan

#awash #been #british #consequences #consular

I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was... nothingness. ↗

— Frances Farmer

#became #god #him #i #less

I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. ↗

— Frances Farmer

#bath #between #clean #cool #could

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#find #fortune #inequality #man #perhaps

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#after #become #books #collection #depends

There comes a point when a dream becomes reality and reality becomes a dream. ↗

— Frances Farmer

#comes #dream #point #reality

The rise to prominence of the Saudi novel in Arabic is the great man-bites-dog of recent world literature. Saudi Arabia is a country without a free press, where European styles and forms are distrusted and where the female half of the population became literate only in this generation. ↗

— James Buchan

#arabic #became #country #distrusted #european

The world dominion of western thought, forms of organisation, technology and military force is not God-given, nor eternal, nor greatly appreciated by the rest of the world. ↗

— James Buchan

#dominion #eternal #force #forms #god-given

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times. ↗

— James Buchan

#antiquity #commerce #cycle #famine #feast