Ali Alper

“the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Submission

“Polemical energy is wasted on showing that liberalism’s aims and ideals are narrowly Western, secular-Enlightened, bourgeois-individualist, procapitalist or—to use a fashionable term of abuse—rootlessly cosmopolitan. None of these slurs or labels stick. No sect or party owns liberalism’s aims and ideals. They serve every nation, gender and class. If that brands liberals as universalists, so be it. They may wear their scarlet “U” with pride.”
― Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea

“We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both.”
― Andy Miller, The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life