Olga's Reviews > The Razor’s Edge

This is a book with an unexpected plot but the idea is not new. Most people 'sleep' all their lives, live and move like robots, participate in the vanity fair and behave exactly as expected from them. Others are often woken up by some traumatizing experience and suspect that there is something more, they look for the meaning of life, for God, for true happiness. And this is when they discover the the Eastern culture with its philosophy...

(I really envied the main character who could afford to spend four (!) years in Paris just reading voraciously and enjoying this magnificent city.)

'Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy.'
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'It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.”
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'The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.'
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'American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.'
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'Unless love is passion, it's not love, but something else; and passion thrives not on satisfaction, but on impediment.'