Gstaad Quotes

An Italian yoga teacher, after many years, came to see U.G. in Gstaad. She brought four of her students with her. U.G. was very polite and gracious to them. She came with her students a second time, and U.G. started asking her over and over again why she was teaching yoga — each time the answer was more self-revealing. After the second visit, she and her students never came back.

Er zijn noodzakelijke en minder noodzakelijke zonden.

Hardly,” Erica replied, before Zoe or I could. “This place is a dump.” Alexander’s good cheer faltered. When he smiled again, he looked far more apologetic. “Ah, yes. Well, there’s been quite a bit of belt-tightening at the Agency lately. We have to keep an eye on the budget for missions now. Not like the good old days. Once, when I was on a mission in Gstaad, I rented the executive suite of the Hotel Beauxville for six weeks. . . .” “And he wonders why the CIA doesn’t have any money anymore,” Erica muttered. “But this place isn’t so bad,” Alexander said spiritedly. “Sure, it’s a little cramped. And it’s cold. And it’s unlikely that the sheets have been washed in the last few weeks. And there’s barely any water pressure in the showers. And . . .” Alexander frowned. “What was my point again?” “This place isn’t so bad,” I reminded him.

While Gstaad is one of the wealthiest places you can set foot in, unlike many similarly upscale spots, farming is not only tolerated here but considered culturally indispensable and a most honorable profession. That’s the reason for the zoning and why cows always have the right of way. The main street through the center of downtown is rightly known as the Promenade, and it is where many newly minted locals go show off their Ferraris and Bentleys and fur coats, while shopping for jewelry, watches, and more fur coats in the boutiques. Cheese making in the Alps is largely seasonal, and like many other mountain towns in Switzerland, the cows have to pass through town when they come down from the mountains in the fall and return in the spring. Usually there is a designated day each season when the streets close to traffic for this migration, but not in Gstaad, where each farmer chooses when to move his herd, and in the fall, cows might block traffic on the Promenade for ten straight days. Each time they come through, the government sends a special cleaning crew to follow, because cheese making is that important here, not so much economically as culturally. That is why some fifty-two mountain peaks around Gstaad are privately owned, not by Russian billionaires, or ski resort operators, but rather by multigenerational farming families like the Bachs.

They circulated through the room, greeting people they knew, which was most of the crowd. Several of Taylor’s mother’s friends came up and complimented her on her dress, asked how Kitty Jackson was faring these days. A few deigned to ask about Win, her father. She answered both with equal insouciance—Kitty was fine, she’d met a Swiss banker skiing in Gstaad over the winter and had elected to stay in Europe for the remainder of the spring. Win was in a minimum-security prison in West Virginia, a guest of the federal government.

To give just one example of what the inside of this world (largely upper-class and Oxbridge world of wealth, power, and privilege) looked like: Huxley sent the UNESCO documents to his close friend the English poet Stephen Spender. In his reply, from his regular retreat at the Chalet Waldegg in Gstaad, Switzerland, Spender says that he won't burden Huxley with his own views on human rights, since he doesn't have anything 'worth saying' on the topic, but then goes on to suggest that Huxley send the documents to some of his acquaintances. This curious list of the great and the good includes the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, the first and second president of Czechoslovakia, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer, and W.H. Auden. Spender even gives Huxley some advice about whom to avoid: 'I honestly don't think there are any outstanding Belgians.

How are you not in Monaco? Or Gstaad? Or like, anywhere with cabana boys and a swim-up bar? I mean, Chip Barclay’s daughter? In an apron? Is this for TikTok?