eloquent excerpts

"This was when terror would strike me, unfailingly. Because the question would be delivered in Malay, and I couldn’t answer in Malay. I was scoring quite distinguished Mother Tongue grades in school, but when it came to banter, I found myself rummaging through a mental dictionary. Furthermore, it was a dictionary submerged in water, soaked to the spine, its pages wrinkled and warped. The very act of diving to retrieve such a wreck involved breathlessness and the deceleration experienced when one enters another medium. What words to choose without sounding stilted or straying to silence mid-sentence? In retrospect though, I think it was my fear of not getting the inflections right that paralysed me, more so than a lexical poverty. Maybe I knew the words to use, how to string them together, but had no idea how to achieve that unreachable diction that would disguise the fact that these very words has been frantically translated from English."

- “The Barbershop” in Malay Sketches by Alfian Sa’at

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

- George Bernard Shaw

"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t."

- Lyall Watson

"The fact is there’s no joy for a girl in growing up, it’s just one disaster after another till you find yourself an old woman who’s good for nothing and who’s real lucky if she finds someone to feel sorry for her."

- “Bahiyya’s Eyes” in Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat

"Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children."

- George Bernard Shaw

"Everything in the whole world is worth what anyone else is prepared to pay for it."

- Damien Hirst

"Human beings love complexity, we love stuff to be interesting and varied in texture and delightful, and that’s what we respond to. We do not respond to everything being in straight lines and painted white. That’s dull. Because we get bored, we get bored of it very quickly. We get bored of housing estates, we get bored of industrial estates, we get bored of shopping centres, because they just don’t offer that depth, and that layering."

- Kevin McCloud in Kevin McCloud: Slumming It

"Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?—for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately…He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to get rich."

- Down & Out in Paris & London by George Orwell

"There is no perfection, only life."

- Milan Kundera

"I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it—but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never “takes”. You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honor or a baritone voice."

- “The Crack-Up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Esquire, 1936