Alice was beginning to get very tired of all this sitting by herself with nothing to do: every so often she tried again to read the book in her lap, but it was made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs, and no quotation marks whatsoever, and what is the point of a book, thought Alice, that does not have any quotation marks?

Your problem with religion is virtually every faithless person's problem with religion: that it offers irreducible answers. But some questions in the end simply aren't empirically verifiable...All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith.

I pointed out that the very proliferation of pseudo journalism these days, the cacophony of conjecture and partisan agendas and sensationalism that seem orchestrated above all to provoke and entertain, tended to leave me feeling as though I know less than ever what my government is doing in my name. Drinking, Alistair shrugged and nodded as if to concede: Yes, well, there's always the moronic inferno.

I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom.

The word for bank is the same, but the word for money changer is not, and while I have never learned the etymology behind this minor asymmetry I can imagine it represents centuries of cultural and ideological dissidence.

Jeg elsker mine venners børn. Jeg tænker på dem, og jeg ringer til dem og er med til deres fødselsdage, men jeg var optaget af andre ting. Og monogami, i det omfang, det er befordrende for godt forældreskab ... nå, jeg har aldrig været specielt begejstret for monogami.

den [musikken, red.] fik hende også til at ville elske, at underkaste sig kærligheden fra et andet menneske så dybt og inderligt, at spørgsmålet om, hvorvidt hun spildte sit liv, overhovedet ikke kunne komme på tale, for hvad kunne være mere ædelt end at hellige sit liv et andet menneskes lykke og tilfredsstillelse?

The problem with the idea that history repeats itself is that when it isn't making us wiser it's making us complacent.

Ydmyghed og tavshed er trods alt at foretrække frem for uvidenhed og arrogance.

Jeg har altid misundt min brors affære med klaveret. Man kan mærke, når nogen ikke plages af tiden.