Цитаты из книг — Пол Теру

Тот, кто назвал китайцев загадочными, возможно, и повстречал на своем жизненном пути одного китайца — но никак не двух. Почти все они — полная тому противоположность: простые, прямолинейные до беспардонности, однозначные и… какой там есть антоним у слова «загадочный»?

Постоянная забота о матери - это очень по-китайски. Нудные обязанности, препятствующие тебе предаваться удовольствиям, — тоже очень по-китайски. Не высказывать, что у тебя на сердце, — это по-китайски; знать, но говорить «не знаю» — это по-китайски; любить безмолвно — это по-китайски; ничем не выдавать своих чувств, тем…

The first dish I was served was, appropriately, sardines. The root is the same, related to Sardinia, just as the word for a Sardinian plant (“which when eaten produced convulsive laughter, ending in death”) had given us the word sardonic—derisive, sneering—because sardonios in Greek meant “of Sardinia.” “People in the…

In the 1970s kidnapping of foreigners had amounted almost to a cottage industry, and Sardinia was known to have developed a culture of kidnapping. The style of crime had deep roots in mountainous regions of the island. Almost anyone with a little money visiting Sardinia was snatched and held in a peasant hut in the…

Corsica is famous for having its own fragrant odor—the herbaceous whiff of the maquis—lavender, honeysuckle, cyclamen, myrtle, wild mint and rosemary. After he left Corsica as a young man, Napoleon never returned to the island, but exiled on Elba—which is just off the coast of Italy—he said he often savored the aroma of…

This Mediterranean sunshine was like a world of warmth and light, and it was inspirational, too. It was easy to understand the feelings of T. E. Lawrence, who took a dip there in 1908 and wrote to his mother, “I felt I had at last reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre,…

I saw Spain as a place that was struggling to keep afloat. It had something to do with tourism. The Spanish towns from the Costa Brava south are dead in the low season; the French towns just a few miles along looked as though they were booming even without tourists. They did not have that soulless appearance of…

Чем хуже человек пишет, тем легче его слова проникают в сердце. Прав был поэт: несовершенство — язык искусства.

А по большому счету - как понял Чеп сегодня, - если ты кого-то любишь, то можешь жить где угодно, потому что, где бы ты ни был, твоя жизнь в любимом человеке.

At a cafe I ordered a cup of coffee. A rock song was playing. Take your bombs away So we have today “Is that a local group?” I asked the young woman behind the counter. “It’s English—must be American,” she said, and handed me my coffee. It was none that I recognized, and they were wartime sentiments. “You’re American?”…

Zadar had been seriously shelled—there were signs of damage everywhere, and it was obvious that it had been hit from up close and vindictively: the ancient main gate of the old town, a Roman relic, had been shelled—for what reason apart from malice?—and chunks blown out of it. The Serbs had set up machine guns and…

Not more than one hundred and twenty-five miles across the Adriatic, at Ancona, Italians, their bellies full of pasta and good wine, were sleeping blissfully; and all this Croat spoke of was bombing and war.

I remarked on the farcical bureaucracy—after an hour we were still at the station, waiting. “Yes, there are delays, because we are all separate now,” he said. “Slovenia. Croatia. Serbia. In Bosnia you have Musselmans.” “They’re different, are they?” “Very much. You see, Slovenian people are much more like Germans or…

The train jogged on to a small station building with wisteria clinging to the walls. We sat there awhile, the old folks muttering while I tried to engage one of them in conversation. There were no talkers. “Just tell me where we are.” “We are leaving the Republic of Slovenia,” an old man said. “We are entering the…

The men in the bar, drinking beer, smoking heavily, did not acknowledge me. Through the unwashed window I watched a dirty yellow engine shunting on Pivka rails. I thought, as I frequently do in such places, What if I had been born here?

Italians were full of compliments, even here at the edge of Slovenia. The Spanish were too restrained to praise, the French too envious and uncertain, the Corsicans too proud. For the more generous and extrovert Italians, praise was normal, words cost nothing, so the flow of daily life was eased. I had lost an important…

Trieste was once the noble port of Austria, and it still looked to me like Vienna-by-the-Sea. The city still had those gray Hapsburg buildings, every one of them looking like the headquarters of an insurance company (and that included the Church of St. Anthony the Thaumaturgist), sloping up from the port, in austere and…

Being in prison in Venice seemed to me like the classical definition of Hell—that you are near Heaven but denied it absolutely. That was also how I felt when I had to leave Venice, on a crowded train to Trieste.