Lawrence Osborne > Quotes

“There is nothing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be "seedy." Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as "seedy" by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall

“For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which--we are told--a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome.”
― Lawrence Osborne

“It’s always too late to change.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Ballad of a Small Player

“There was, I thought, something calling to me from out in the dark.
It came from out in the tempest, even from the lights of the fishing boats a mile out at sea. You can be called to a last effort, a final heroic statement, because I doubt you call yourself to leave comforts and certainties for an open road. But the call is inside your own head. It's a sad summons from the depths of your own wasted past. You could call it the imperative to go out with full-tilt trumpets and gunshots instead of the quietly desperate sound of the hospital ventilator. Victory instead of defeat.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Only to Sleep

“For in the end, alcohol is merely us, a materialization of our own nature. To repress it is to repress something that we know about ourselves but cannot celebrate or even accept. It is like having a dance partner we cannot trust with our wallet.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Wet And The Dry: A Drinker's Journey

“There are men like the walking books in 'Fahrenheit 451' who are content to pass their lives slowly filling up with knowledge which can never be used, and it is the very filling up that gives them a sense of life's pointless sweetness.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World

“One can rarely say enough about the kindness of Italians. One is always treated as a human being who needs unpredictable things—like a moment by oneself with a bottle on the beach. They have a true gift for what can only be called spontaneous delicacy.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World

“Sexual pessimism: The equation of sexual love outside the prerequisites of reproduction with death.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Poisoned Embrace: A Brief History of Sexual Pessimism

“Moreover, you are up against laws, and the laws will favor you if you show no arrogance toward them. They will not harm you if you never assume that you are superior to them.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Ballad of a Small Player

“since life is but a sport and a pastime, as the Koran carefully reminds us, and because it is a game and nothing more, one forgets that the point of life is death.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven

“Our middle age is going to be uniquely horrible. We'll be alone with our cats and our books. No one wants to admit it, but that's where it ends up. Solitude plus cats.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Glass Kingdom

“The thing is, one gets tired of one’s own stories. It happens by the time you turn fifty. You’ve heard them all a thousand times, and they get worse with each retelling. Finally, they become nauseating.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Beautiful Animals

“But he never asked anything about the Berbers, who seemed to him to be elements of an immoveable décor and nothing else. A form of statuary. Of course, he affected to be concerned about them, because that is what everyone nowadays was taught to do. But he really detested wasting any breath on them. They were a source of terrorism, of course; that made them interesting during heated debates.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven

“They began to talk, because the silence was conducive to it.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Beautiful Animals

“It’s more like winning than winning itself, and everyone knows you are not a real player until you secretly prefer losing.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Ballad of a Small Player

“I stepped forward to announce my name, my hopeless mission: Philip Marlowe, so recently uplifted from retirement. I flinched as her eyes took me in, and something took me aback. The eyes were not closed against me, they were open and inquisitive—but not too much so. She had the level interest in something new that a leopard has. While it decides whether you can be killed or not, its eyes are remarkably gentle and serene.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Only to Sleep

“Márquez”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall

“In a house full of buxom young women”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel

“do we produce our own accidents? Are they the sum total of our little neglects?”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel

“Everywhere is dangerous, he thought, everywhere where human beings exist and multiply and continue to breathe.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Beautiful Animals

“You destroy people in order to make ideas live. It’s a uniquely Western kind of behavior. Pol Pot was a good student, remember, and a very good carpenter. A gentle boy. He lived for ideas, which is why you had women being drained of all their blood in a converted school.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Hunters in the Dark

“His youth was a wingless Dodo.”
― Lawrence Osborne

“There had been eleven years of this sort of contest; the exact”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel

“The past is gone, what is hoped for is absent and there is only the hour in which you are.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven

“since life is but a sport and a pastime”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel

“the room was so loud that soon they were almost forgotten”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel

“The moneyed English buffoon is a particular species. It is much cruder than it lets on—it’s a Viking with silverware.”
― Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel

“Their snores could be heard throughout the house, even in her little cell sunk in the basement under thick floors. It was a disgusting sound, a sound commensurate with her bestial employers,”
― Lawrence Osborne, Beautiful Animals

“Retirement had seemed like the best way not to die, but the adrenaline had gone the day I threw in the towel and it never returned. You have your books and your movies, your daydreams and your moments in the sun, but none of those can save you any more than irony can.”
― Lawrence Osborne

“You think there’s unconditional love, but there isn’t. The conditions are everything.”
― Lawrence Osborne, Beautiful Animals