#ld

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

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

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? ↗

— Frances Farmer

#always #began #bother #children #did

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka. ↗

— James Buchan

#bombings #during #east #europe #exclusive

I was watching TV and saw people with masks, weapons, and grenades. I thought, Is that really possible? Could we be here yet again? And go into civil war one more time? ↗

— Nadine Labaki

#civil #civil war #could #go #grenades

The great disadvantage of getting older is to be obliged to relive the salient economic events of one's youth, with nothing learned and nothing forgotten. ↗

— James Buchan

#economic #events #forgotten #getting #getting older

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 greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#faults #greatest #i #none #say

But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn't God. ↗

— Frances Farmer

#children #cleanliness #father #feeling #god