Idyllic Book Quotes

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time. Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed. If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers. In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don’t belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone’s right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister… Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable. The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. A long time a go a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty. You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You’re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist’s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That’s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That’s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you. If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

Amazing how quickly the past becomes idyllic.

Why didn't you write all this time? Did you not remember us in a song? A dance? In the skies littered with stars? Did you not get drunk? Why didn’t you write all this time? Did you not remember us in a film? A book? In idyllic dusks and dawns? Did you not get high? It is good that you didn't. For all is well. I am drunk and dazed. I have already forgotten you and your bewitching ways.

All human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea.

I emphasize: 'idyll' and 'for all', because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea.

There are occasions when a moralising novelist can merely wring his hands and leave matters to take their course.

Then the voice - which identified itself as the prince of this world, the only being who really knows what happens on Earth - began to show him the people around him on the beach. The wonderful father who was busy packing things up and helping his children put on some warm clothes and who would love to have an affair with his secretary, but was terrified on his wife's response. His wife who would like to work and have her independence, but who was terrified of her husband's response. The children who behave themselves because they were terrified of being punished. The girl who was reading a book all on her own beneath the sunshade, pretending she didn't care, but inside was terrified of spending the rest of her life alone. The boy running around with a tennis racuqet , terrified of having to live up to his parents' expectations. The waiter serving tropical drinks to the rich customers and terrified that he could be sacket at any moment. The young girl who wanted to be a dance, but who was studying law instead because she was terrified of what the neighbours might say. The old man who didn't smoke or drink and said he felt much better for it, when in truth it was the terror of death what whispered in his ears like the wind. The married couple who ran by, splashing through the surf, with a smile on their face but with a terror in their hearts telling them that they would soon be old, boring and useless. The man with the suntan who swept up in his launch in front of everybody and waved and smiled, but was terrified because he could lose all his money from one moment to the next. The hotel owner, watching the whole idyllic scene from his office, trying to keep everyone happy and cheerful, urging his accountants to ever greater vigilance, and terrified because he knew that however honest he was government officials would still find mistakes in his accounts if they wanted to. There was terror in each and every one of the people on that beautiful beach and on that breathtakingly beautiful evening. Terror of being alone, terror of the darkness filling their imaginations with devils, terror of doing anything not in the manuals of good behaviour, terror of God's punishing any mistake, terror of trying and failing, terror of succeeding and having to live with the envy of other people, terror of loving and being rejected, terror of asking for a rise in salary, of accepting an invitation, of going somewhere new, of not being able to speak a foreign language, of not making the right impression, of growing old, of dying, of being pointed out because of one's defects, of not being pointed out because of one's merits, of not being noticed either for one's defects of one's merits.

We need to reform our funeral industry, introducing new practices that aren't so profit-oriented, and that do more to include the family. But we cannot begin to reform—or even question!-our death systems when we act like little Jean de Brébeufs, falsely convinced we have it right while all these "other people" are disrespectful and barbarous. This dismissive attitude can be found in places you'd never expect. Lonely Planet, the largest guidebook publisher in the world, included the idyllic Trunyan cemetery in their book on visiting Bali. In Trunyan, the villagers weave bamboo cages for their dead to decompose in, and then stack the skulls and bones out in the lush green landscape. Lonely Planet, instead of explaining the meaning behind these ancient customs, advised wise travelers to "skip the ghoulish spectacle.

Don’t you routinely push yourself into absurd plot twists? Aren’t you often lured into someone else’s drama? It’s hard to resist getting hooked. You believe the premise of their story, whatever it is, and sign on to the madness. It happens. Kids use their amazing imaginations for fun. For them, it’s great to be in an imagined world and to believe in it completely. In the company of other excited kids, they can take a thrilling ride. But staying too long in a fantasy is exhausting, even for a child. After an afternoon of pretending, children are relieved to be called home for supper and to collapse into a warm bed. We adults, too, need to be called home to ourselves. Young or old, no one wants to be locked in a tower forever, however magical it might have seemed at first. I’m asking you to notice where you put your faith, and make changes when you need to. Common sense says to put your faith in you. Don’t lie to yourself for the sake of an idyllic notion. It’s not enough to admit to the fantasy, you need to wake yourself up. See where a bad story is taking you, and alter your course. Say no to the drama. Win the war over fear. Protect yourself from your own abuses, no one can do it for you.

The ubiquity of racism is an idea echoed by one of my favourite writers, Afua Hirsch, in her book Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. Above all, I admire Hirsch’s tenacity, because even though she comes from an extremely wealthy family, was privately educated, enjoyed an idyllic childhood complete with ‘berry-stained rambles on Wimbledon Common’ and ‘walking holidays in the Alps’, she is still able to see past all that to realise that she is every bit as subjugated as those individuals who were bought and sold during the era of slavery. She is also brave enough to call out the obvious racism of anyone who gave her book a bad review.

If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself. Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

All seizures of power, no matter how ‘strong or well-meaning’ the seizers, will go the same way. That’s what power does. Meanwhile, at exactly the same time as the publication of The Lord of the Rings William Golding was bringing out his fables, Lord of the Flies (1954), and The Inheritors (1955), the meaning of which Golding conveniently summarized for commentators in a later essay, ‘Fable’, in his collection The Hot Gates: I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head. (Hot Gates, p. 87) So the English choirboys, marooned on an idyllic desert island, invent murder and human sacrifice and create the ‘lord of the flies’ himself, Beelzebub; in The Inheritors our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, exterminate the gentle and friendly Neanderthals and create an entirely false legend of ogres and cannibals to justify their actions. A very similar if more complex argument was put forward, one might add, by the other great fantasy of the 1950s, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, a work which began like Tolkien’s with a children’s book, The Sword in the Stone (1937), but took even longer than Tolkien’s to reach termination, appearing as a whole (though still unfinished) in 1958. White’s points are too many and too self-doubting to summarize readily, but there is at least no doubt that White saw in humanity a basic urge to destruction, expressed in a work written like The Lord of the Rings, nationibus in diro bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’. Orwell, Golding, White (and several other post-war authors of fantasy and fable): the thought that they expressed in their highly different ways was that people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields. That is why what Gandalf says has rung true to virtually everyone who reads it – though it is, I repeat, yet one more anachronism in Middle-earth, and the greatest of them, an entirely modern conviction.

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante and his guide Virgil visited the Castle of Limbo, in the center of which was an idyllic green meadow. This was where the great pagan souls, the virtuous pagans, spent eternity. Limbo was a place of calm contemplation and tranquility. Its denizens were not tormented and tortured but left to their own devices. They could converse with one another among green fields and scenic towers. The most illustrious of them radiated an inner light, reflecting their genius. Even the Abrahamic God was dazzled by the enlightened pagans, the great heroes of philosophy, art, poetry, science and mathematics. No one can quench their light, and no one can remove their joy.

the old and worn buildings held a theatrical magic to their fading façades. They were weathered almost by design; they almost looked like they had been lifted from some stage designer's idyllic dream for an opera setting. The dusty, powdery ochres, terracottas, pale blues and pine greens lit by that soft morning glow; the comforting sun's ascent to its daily station, high and shining above that glorious, sparkling old city.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY

In La Volupté and L’Art de Jouir he gives his prescription for happiness. It is very delicate, very sentimental, and very erotic, illustrated with excerpts from imaginary classical idylls. He dislikes obscenity and obscene books (which he considers dangerous as destroying illusions) and prefers what I can only qualify as elegant poetic pornography. For him, pleasure is inexistent without sentiment. Within the limits he sets himself he shows considerable interest and knowledge in sexual technique and variations, even going beyond what is generally considered permitted with the explanation that “Tout est femme dans ce qu’on aime.

The ancient Egyptian book of the dead is a series of spells to guide you through your afterlife. If you were in the upper class, everything was arranged so that you'd be buried with the tools necessary to avoid being banished to "nonexistence," (what we call the eventual "fade to black.") But if your pass the "weighing of the heart" ritual and make it to the "two fields," you'll lead an idyllic, "heaven"-like afterlife. . . So, in the end, rich people become like their money. . . When you spend money, it doesn't die. . . it just travels.

emphasize: idyll and for all, because all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter.

This book, also known as the Bible of Psychiatry, explains that to be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) a person has to meet at least five of the following criteria: •​Has a grandiose sense of self-importance; for example, exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior. •​Has fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love. •​Believes that they are “special” and should only associate with other “special” or high-status people or institutions. •​Requires excessive admiration. •​Has a sense of entitlement, that is, an unreasonable expectation of favorable treatment, or automatic compliance with their wishes. •​Takes advantage of others to achieve their ends. •​Lacks empathy and is unwilling or unable to recognize other people’s feelings or needs. •​Is often envious of others and believes that others are envious in return. •​Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

the world of selling second-hand books is not quite an idyll of sitting in an armchair by a roaring fire with your slipper-clad feet up, smoking a pipe and reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall while a stream of charming customers engages you in intelligent conversation, before parting with fistfuls of cash.

It’s a real place,” I counter. Dusty had made the little mountain town sound so idyllic I’d actually googled it. Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, sits just a little ways outside Asheville.

1950s housekeeping manuals – ‘A must for every new wife!’ read the text on the cover. Books like this made Roxanne smile and marvel at the fact that, not so very long ago, the image of idyllic domestic life involved an immaculately-coiffed woman in a pinny presenting dinner to her husband on his return from

Gulmarg in December is a winter wonderland nestled in the heart of the Indian Himalayas. As the first snowflakes blanket the landscape, the entire region transforms into a picturesque paradise. The quaint town of Gulmarg becomes a hub for snow enthusiasts, offering a myriad of activities such as skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing. The Gulmarg Gondola, one of the highest cable cars in the world, provides breathtaking views of the snow-capped peaks. Adventure-seekers can also explore the pristine forests on snowmobiles or enjoy a serene horse-drawn sledge ride. The cozy hotels and cottages offer warm hospitality and delicious Kashmiri cuisine, making Gulmarg in December an idyllic destination for a winter getaway amidst nature's splendor. click here to book now-

In 1843 the publisher Charles Knight provided the nation with the first book-length biography of the national poet, William Shakspere: A Biography. (Nineteenth-century biographers tended to use “Shakspere,” consistent with the spelling on his baptismal and burial records.) The book was an extended Victorian fantasy—a “descriptive reverie,” as one critic at the time put it—freely fictionalizing Shakespeare’s life, blissfully untethered from scholarly citation or historical fact. Since Shakespeare could not be known through letters, journals, or other personal records, Knight found him in Stratford-upon-Avon—in the streets and village life, the surrounding fields and forests, and in the Birthplace itself. Stratford filled in the gaps—indeed, became Shakespeare’s biography. The Warwickshire countryside elucidated his love of nature; the half-timbered house on Henley Street, his idyllic childhood.

I own an island, Constance—a private island in the Florida Keys. It’s west of No Name Key and northeast of Key West. It’s not a big island, but it’s a jewel. It is called Halcyon. I have a house there; a breezy mansion furnished with books and instruments and paintings; it offers both sunrise and sunset views; and it has been stocked with all the rare wines, champagnes, and delicacies you could ever wish for. I’ve been preparing this idyll over the years with painstaking, excessive care. It was to be a bastion; my last and final retreat from the world. But—as I was recovering in that hut in Ginostra—I realized that such a place, no matter how ideal, would be unbearably lonely without another person—the one, the perfect person—with whom to share it.” He paused. “Need I name that person?

I write in order to live and I live in order to write, and I've come close to imagining that writing and living might merge completely: I would live in the company of dictionaries, deep in some provincial retreat, in the mornings I would go for a walk in the woods, in the afternoons I would blacken a few sheets of paper, in the evenings I would relax perhaps by listening to a bit of music.

All dreams are young, my host, my friend. All dreams belong to youth, whether they be nightmares or idylls.

THE LIFE OF Björnstjerne Björnson was so full and active, and involves to such a degree the intellectual and political history of his country in the second half of the nineteenth century, that it is impossible in a short sketch to do more than indicate its main outlines. He was born, the son of a pastor, in Kvikne, Osterdal, Norway, on December 8, 1832, but his youth was spent mainly in the picturesque district of Romsdal. He was educated in Molde and Christiania, and early began a career as a journalist and dramatic critic. His first book of importance was “Synnöve Solbakken” (1857), and it was followed by “Arne,” “A Happy Boy” (1860), and “The Fisher Maiden.” These works deal with the Norwegian peasant, portrayed with understanding and sympathy, and, though true to nature, have an idyllic quality which separates them from much of the fiction of rural life that was being written elsewhere in Europe at that time.

What’s your vision of life in the Highlands—men in kilts? Jacobite risings? James Fraser? Bagpipes for breakfast?’ He grunted. ‘That’s a far cry from reality, love. Life here is not idyllic. It’s not a fairy tale. It’s difficult.