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Basque is one of the world's more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words - profanities, I assume.
Jan Morris
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Jan Morris
Age: 94 †
Born: 1926
Born: October 2
Died: 2020
Died: November 20
Author
Historian
Journalist
Clevedon
Somerset
World
Adults
Mastered
Devil
Foreigners
Tried
Languages
Words
Handful
Learn
Managed
Language
Adult
Basques
Three
Assume
Alarming
Ever
Assuming
Profanity
More quotes by Jan Morris
There are only two rules. One is E. M. Forster's guide to Alexandria the best way to know Alexandria is to wander aimlessly. The second is from the Psalms grin like a dog and run about through the city.
Jan Morris
Indians love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic.
Jan Morris
As to sex, the original pleasure, I cannot recommend too highly the advantages of androgyny.
Jan Morris
Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
Jan Morris
Vermonters are not only charmless of manner, on the whole they are also, as far as I can judge, utterly without pretence, and give the salutary impression that they don't care ten cents whether you are amused, affronted, intrigued, or bored stiff by them. Hardly anybody asked me how I liked Vermont. Not a soul said 'Have a nice day!
Jan Morris
If I was an aspirant litterateur, I was also an aspirant anarchist. I have disliked Authority always, though sometimes seduced by its resplendence.
Jan Morris
Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.
Jan Morris
Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.
Jan Morris
To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible.
Jan Morris
I am when the Chinese, who know everything, build a house, they consult the precepts of an ancient science, Feng Shui, which tells them exactly how, when, and where the work must be done, and so brings good fortune to the home forever.
Jan Morris
I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too.
Jan Morris
The genius of Canada remains essentially a deflationary genius.
Jan Morris
I’ve become obsessed with the idea of reconciliation, particularly reconciliation with nature but with people too, of course. I think that travel has been a kind of search for that, a pursuit for unity and even an attempt to contribute to a sense of unity.
Jan Morris
I half cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.
Jan Morris
the personality of St. John's, Newfoundland, hits you like a smack in the face with a dried cod, enthusiastically administered by its citizenry.
Jan Morris
Chicago's downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world.
Jan Morris
It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest.
Jan Morris
Vermonters, it seems to me, are like ethnics in their own land. They are exceedingly conscious of their difference from other Americans, and they talk a great deal about outsiders, newcomers, and people from the south.
Jan Morris
I was born with the wrong body, being feminine by gender but male by sex, and I could achieve completeness only when the one was adjusted to the other.
Jan Morris
The more I was treated as a woman, the more woman I became. A adapted willy-nilly. If I was assumed to be incompetent at reversing cars, or opening bottles, oddly incompetent I found myself becoming. If a case was thought too heavy for me, inexplicably I found it so myself.
Jan Morris