Clari Zimmermann

“American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.”
― Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

“It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

“Almost all the people who’ve had the most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn’t but have met them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge