{"author":"John Lanchester","author_id":"John+Lanchester","total_quotes":22,"quotes":[{"text":"In Shahid's view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn't be solved by being ignored.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["difficult-times","difficulties","going-along","ignoring-things","life","problems"],"id":16991,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"On the opposite wall was a Damien Hirst spot painting, bought by Arabella after a decent bonus season. Roger's considered view of the painting, looking at it from aesthetic, art-historical, interior-design, and psychological points of view, was that it had cost forty-seven thousand pounds, plus VAT.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["art","costs","expenses","paintings","worth"],"id":44787,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"Of seatbelts as an opportunity to take up drunk-driving.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["kindlehighlight"],"id":79959,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["calmness","crushes","desire","fancy","home","love","quietness"],"id":98605,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["aging","denial"],"id":135475,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"As Confucius says, under some circumstances murder can be forgiven; but unreasonableness never is.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["murder"],"id":149461,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"It’s as if people used the invention.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["kindlehighlight"],"id":153912,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["aging","mother","old","stranger"],"id":175902,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"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.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["display","london","rich","stuff"],"id":186561,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"},{"text":"Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.","author":"John Lanchester","tags":["choices","history","human-beings"],"id":206565,"author_id":"John+Lanchester"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":22,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}