#no

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 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

Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days. ↗

— James Buchan

#barrel #benighted #days #dependent #europe

Is there any purpose to translating poetry? A poem does not contain information of importance, like a signpost or a warning notice. ↗

— James Buchan

#contain #does #importance #information #like

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

I have to figure out why I worked at a job I hated for years. I have to find out why I can’t see what everyone else sees in me. I don’t feel beautiful. When I look in the mirror, I never saw beautiful. For this to happen to someone like me, it’s devastating, Jonas. I don’t want you to think it’s vanity, it isn’t. I can’t see me and I need to be able to do that. I need to find out what I’m like and what I want. I have to be comfortable in my own skin before I can be in a relationship the way you want. ↗

— Christine Feehan

#love-yourself #relationships #self-esteem #beauty

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags. ↗

— James Buchan

#any #bags #commerce #completed #course

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