It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
Alain de BottonThe moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de BottonIt's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de BottonOne wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
Alain de Botton