Magdelanye’s Reviews > The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos > Status Update

I felt slightly depressed as the conversation continued, owing to the realization that I was talking to someone for whom all the vanities and selfishness to which I am prone were non-existent. I had an unusually strong desire to be at my best in his presence....p321

A stranger meeting me then would have thought I was a dangerous lunatic. p289

on Mount Athos...this completely unmaterialistic atmosphere the innate goodness of human nature is given a chance to breathe. p177

Touchy on points of personal dignity, rancorous, skeptical and unimpressable, at least outwardly, the Mangas have a rigorous code of honour and conduct among themselves which has nothing whatever to do with the official legal code. p245

...the indoctrination of prep schools, which...turns children-all of them, till then, near-geniuses trailing clouds of glory- into frightened, insufferable little conformist priest. p221

I wish we had met as total strangers when I was grown up, because today, if I saw him sitting in a hotel, say, in the Italian mountains, I would have longed to get to know him for the very reasons that filled me with malaise at the time. p220

My first memories...are overlaid by many more, and it is hard to exclude the inklings gleaned later when writing of these first encounters. p153

My trouble was that practically everything, not only the most disparate, contradictory and mutually exclusive things and people, but many others found repellent, painful, unrewarding and above all tedious, filled me with the same wild fascination. p115

With as little warning as its outbreak, the storm stopped. The lash of the falling water was hushed, and the veil lifted. The clouds, threadbare and empty now, fell to pieces and fluttered away in tatters across a laundered and peaceful sky of turquoise. p87

Doubt springs. It doesn't matter, but it is odd that memory should be so evasive about the faces and the scene...and so crystalline about irrelevance....p38