Nothing more exhausting than a timid guest.”

They say the education of a child begins several generations before it is born.

Given what had happened a moment ago, it seemed insensitive to make my usual stand on the matter of jewellery. I smiled. He brightened up + produced a box from his pocket. “Good! Because I already got it!” It’s a slender band of white gold. It’ll be rather lovely once it fades.

(we make our own weather; personal gain ought to be a public asset)

the closer one is to a source of power, the quieter it gets. Authority and money surround themselves with silence, and one can measure the reach of someone’s influence by the thickness of the hush enveloping them.

God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.

That she never shed this persona made her wonder, later in life, if that was not who she had truly been all along or if, rather, over the years, her spirit had shaped itself after the mask.

She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.

Kitsch. Can’t think of Engl. trans. for this word. A copy that’s so proud of how close it comes to the original that it believes there’s more worth in this closeness than in originality itself. “It looks just like . . . !” Imposture of feeling over actual emotion; sentimentality over sentiment.