quotes at random, no. 38 - foreign parts

[fiefoe]

• If they want to stop being Lutherans they must write to the government and quit; on the other hand, if they fill out a form, they can start their own cult and receive a subsidy.
• One reason they all feel important is that they all can go see the prime minister anytime they like.
• Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it.
• At the dawn of the 21st century, Icelanders were still waiting for some task more suited to their filigreed minds to turn up inside their economy so they might do it. <> Enter investment banking.

The faces and hands are crafted from ivory, realistic down to the veins in the hands. The hair is made from the skin of unborn seals. The coat is walrus intestine. It is a pride of the Eskimos that every part of every slaughtered animal is used for something.

Lenin was the last ruler of the country who could speak an educated Russian. Stalin’s Georgian accent was so thick he rarely risked speaking in public. Khrushchev’s vocabulary was crude and his grammar barbaric. Brezhnev could scarcely put two sentences together. Gorbachev spoke with a provincial southern accent. The less said of Yeltsin’s slurred diction the better. To hear a leader of the country capable once again of expressing himself with clarity, accuracy and fluency, in a more or less correct idiom, comes as music to many Russians.

Every day, like the subaltern heroes in a James Joyce novel, some 4,000 tiffin-wallahs or packed lunch boys set off across Bombay's far-flung and verdant outer suburbs.

<<