Book lovers will understand me,
and they will know too that part of the pleasure
of a library lies in its very existence.
In a Kenya game park once I saw a family of wart-hogs waddling ungainly and in a tremendous hurry across the grass. Contemptuous though I am of those who find animals comic…still I could not help laughing at this quaint spectacle. My African companion rightly rebuked me. “You should not laugh at them,” he said. “They are beautiful to each other.
Jan MorrisFew conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life.
Jan MorrisIt was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest....
Jan MorrisThe language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.
Jan MorrisA scent of jasmine and a rasp of sand.
Jan MorrisMovement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city’s skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.
Jan MorrisCertainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.
Jan MorrisDelhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded the strategic routes from the northwest, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers' town, a politicians' town, journalists', diplomats' town. It is Asia's Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.
Jan MorrisThere are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.
They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors.
They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.
They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.
They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.
They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humor and understanding.
When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.
They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean.
They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion, or political correctness.
They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.
It is the nation of nowhere.
Pagina 1 di 1.
Data privacy
Imprint
Contact
Diese Website verwendet Cookies, um Ihnen die bestmögliche Funktionalität bieten zu können.