Capital
John Lanchester
Top 10 Best Quotes
“The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.”
“But knowing that you had gone wrong, and knowing how you had gone wrong, were not the same thing as knowing how to put it right.”
“He had a simple maxim for all competitive or adversarial situations: work out what the other party least wants you to do, and then do it. Relieving your feelings was fun, but the best course of action was to make things as difficult as possible for the person trying to make things difficult for you.”
“You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty.”
“London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale.”
“But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it.”
“The seven Ps: Proper Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss-Poor Performance”
“Sometimes, the only way of doing something is to do it.”
“It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.”
“Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.”
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Book Keywords:
display, desire, mother, old, capital, worry, human-beings, control, love, adversaries, lanchester, calmness, crushes, stuff, fancy, wrong-and-right, quietness, home, rich, difficulties, conflict, competition, contrariness, denial, choices, aging, history, knowing, stranger, london
