Books: Best Of

Our obituary writer is an extreme, pedantic gossip. He gets things wrong, but he gets them in detail.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ... Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.

Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendía could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

“All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.

I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee – this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness – crawls over her left Eye. I squeezed Myself into

You must go back and put out the fire. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames.