The Metaphysical Club Quotes & Sayings

The issue is not that you are wearing buckets of make up. The real problem is how does the inside look — Sahndra Fon Dufe

Order what you feel like eating," says your impatient dinner companion. But the problem is that you don't KNOW what you feel like eating. What you feel like eating is precisely what you are trying to figure out.
Order what you feel like eating" is just a piece of advice about the criteria you should be using to guide your deliberations. It is not a solution to your menu problem - just as "Do the right thing" and "Tell the truth" are only suggestions about criteria, not answers to actual dilemmas. The actual dilemma is what, in the particular case staring you in the face, the right thing to do or the honest thing to say really is. And making those kinds of decisions - about what is right or what is truthful - IS like deciding what to order in a restaurant, in the sense that getting a handle on tastiness is no harder or easier (even though it is generally less important) than getting a handle on justice or truth. — Louis Menand

I can't say that I pursued a career. I really didn't, it just sort of happened. — Angela Lansbury

We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture. — Alix Ohlin

And I feel that filmmakers ought to be careful with the use of 3D. Because if you look back over the decades, you see that 3D has come and gone for I don't know how many years now. — Warwick Davis

I choose to live in peace today. I choose to get lost in my inner beauty today. — Debasish Mridha

Television's not going read stories to you. — Kurt Loder

We are not princes of the earth, we are the descendants of worms, and any nobility must be earned. — PZ Myers

What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another's lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures ( ... ) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation. — George Scialabba

Miles gathered his reins, tensed one calf, and shifted his weight slightly, and Fat Ninny responded with a neat half turn and two precise back steps. The thick-set roan gelding could not have been mistaken by the most ignorant urbanite for a fiery steed, but Miles adored him, for his dark and liquid eye, his wide velvet nose, his phlegmatic disposition equally unappalled by rushing streams or screaming aircars, but most of all for his exquisite dressage-trained responsiveness. Brains before beauty. Just being around him made Miles calmer; the beast was an emotional blotter, like a purring cat. Miles patted Fat Ninny on the neck. "If anybody asks," he murmured, "I'll tell them your name is Chieftain." Fat Ninny waggled one fuzzy ear, heaving a whooshing, barrel-chested sigh. Grandfather — Lois McMaster Bujold

I detest a man who knows that he knows. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.