“The school was nothing but reminiscence — of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.”
Source: A Boy's Own Story (1982), Chapter Six (p. 145).
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Edmund White 28
American novelist and LGBT essayist 1940Related quotes
Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter “Formerly, 1” (p. 53)
The Twilight Zone, "The Fugitive" (1962).
The Twilight Zone
“I imagine hell like this: Italian punctuality, German humour and English wine.”
Fox News interview (May 2004)
Context: There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.
Source: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Chapter VI, THE CONTAGION OF LIBERTY, p. 273.
Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 319.
“Our world is fundamentally different from the one we were taught about in school.”
Future Proofing You (2021)
Context: I don't find fantasy to be more or less suited to philosophical questions than any other genre, really. I think that the soul of fantasy—or second-world fantasy at least—is our problematic relationship with nostalgia. The impulse to return to a golden age seems to be pretty close to the bone, at least in western cultures, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's a human universal. For me, it's tied up with the experience of aging and the impulse to recapture youth. Epic fantasy, I think, takes its power from that. We create golden eras and either celebrate them or—more often—mourn their loss.
Interview with Peter Orullian http://orullian.com/writing/danielabraham_interview.html