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.
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Chapter Six (p. 145)Edmund White
Hoxha was not just 'quite' cultured, he was very cultured. In spite of coming from the most backward country in Europe, he was by far the best-read head of any Communist party in the bloc. On visits to the other countries in Eastern Europe, he often comments on the philistinism of his bloc colleagues. Hoxha knew fluent French and had a working knowledge (either verbal or written) of Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian and English. The range of references in his memoirs is not what one would expect from a Balkan ex-Muslim Stalinist.
Enver Hoxha
A French Author has found out that the French music is for the heart; Italian music, for the ear only: but I do not know how it is to get at the one but by means of the other, and I fancy that which does not please the ear, will never find its way to the heart. I think it is Confucius who says, that the state of music is a proof of the good or bad customs of a country. The French nation would lose by such a judgment and the Italian gain more than it deserves.
Peter Beckford
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.
Daniel Abraham
I don’t know why you use a fancy French word like détente when there’s a good English phrase for it — cold war.
Golda Meir
An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.
Edith Wharton
White, Edmund
White, Ellen G.
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