“It's always surprising to be reminded that while you're watching and thinking about people, all knowing and superior, they're watching and thinking about you, right back at you.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 236 of 303
“I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.”
“The thing about stories is you have to pick the ones that last.”
“In theory it was, around now, Literature. Susan hated Literature. She'd much prefer to read a good book.”
“What was the point of education, he thought, if people went out afterward and used it?”
“You see the lighted windows and what you want to think is that there may be many interesting stories behind them, but what you know is that really there are just dull, dull souls, mere consumers of food, who think their instincts are emotions and their tiny lives of more account than a whisper of wind.”
“I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.”
“People are often so busy living that they never stop to wonder why.”
“An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.”
“No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.”
“Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.”
“Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust? Very nearly everyone, come to think of it.”
“Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them-when she thought about them at all-as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right.”
“If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.”
“Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face." (pp. 348-349)”
“One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.”
“The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.”
“Facts are not interesting to me.”
“Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don't they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer.”
“Thinking little at all about nothing in particular.”