“From a distance he had the bland aspect of a philanthropist.”
Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Agatha Christie 320
English mystery and detective writer 1890–1976Related quotes
Black God's Kiss (1934)
Context: All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth.
“I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.”
Apocalypse Descending (2002)
Context: I was about ten when I first read 1984 and Lord of the Flies, both of which absolutely terrified me — especially 1984, because I figured out that Julia, Winston Smith's lover, would have been born the same year I was. I knew these books were fiction, but I was far too young to have a grasp on the political or cultural realities behind them — I had no distance or detachment from what I read: it seemed too real to me, too possible.
Yulassetar Crade removes a TV reporter in zero gravity, Part 12, "Requiem"
Anathem (2008)
Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 8 (p. 129)
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
Context: Courses were offered in such fields as nineteenth-century black history and Hispanic-American folk art. The activists made a peculiar claim for these classes. They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture. The perspective gained in the classroom or the library does indeed permit an academic to draw nearer to and understand better the culture of the alien poor. But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.
