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Book: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Quotes of Book: A Week at the Airport: A
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  1. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    Every skillful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses - and in so doing prompts us to find and savour those in the world around us.
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  2. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    One 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.
    book-quotetravelmovementworlds

  3. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special {as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far}.
    book-quotetravelarrivals

  4. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    As David lifted a suitcase onto the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well.
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  5. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still have trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?
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  6. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.
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  7. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.
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  8. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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  9. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.
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  10. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?
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  11. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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  12. Alain de Botton _ A Week at the Airport: A

    Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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