“I do think it's interesting when people are born into families that at one point had huge amounts of money and that money has kind of vanished over the generations and they're sort of the last vestiges. You see that these people live really quite modestly and yet, somehow the way the clothes fit them, they still have some kind of strange genetic advantage over the rest of us. There's always these weird things in which you detect the legacy. There's a pair of cufflinks that you look at and go, "Oh, my God! These had to come from the Romanovs."” PeopleThinkingKindInterestingStrangeFitLegacy Author:Lawrence Douglas
“I think for much of the middle classes, nothing could be more fantastic than to have a contact with fame. But once you have that contact with fame and find out how vacuous it is, that it doesn't answer anything or supply any ultimate revelation to cosmic dilemmas and you're still left with yourself, then it's back to the drawing room with fading light and one light bulb out in the very expensive chandelier that no one has bothered to replace.” ThinkingFameUltimateFantasticRevelationsMiddle ClassCosmicBotheredDilemmaLight Bulb Author:Lawrence Douglas
“Nothing is drearier than just always telling the truth about yourself. Rousseau, who as far as I can tell was a pathological liar, made this wonderful distinction between lying, which he said there was something wrong with if you were trying to extract an advantage for yourself or evade responsibility for some nasty thing you'd done. But if all you're really trying to do is impress or keep it young or make life more vivid and interesting, go for it! There's no real harm in doing something like that. I think people can be overly saddled to the truth.” PeopleThinkingTryingRealDoneLyingInterestingResponsibilityWonderfulTelling The TruthLiarsAbout YourselfNastyImpress Author:Lawrence Douglas