Christopher

“The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals’ motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

“To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.”
― Édouard Levé, Autoportrait

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air