Top 24 John Burdett Quotes
#1. Your fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of your fear of letting go.
John Burdett
#2. The great weakness of the West is that it has nothing with which to inspire loyalty except wealth. But what is wealth? Another washing machine, a bigger car, a nicer house to live in? Not much to feed the spirit in all that.
John Burdett
#3. The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in
pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the
universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the
thoroughly dispossessed.
John Burdett
#4. I'm fascinated by Buddhism. I adore Buddhism, and I read about it all the time, but I haven't formally become a Buddhist, although I don't really know why I haven't. I guess I feel I don't need to.
John Burdett
#5. If the world is telling you you're successful, but you don't feel it, you might as well have failed.
John Burdett
#6. In essence, the Thai people are not materialistic at all. They're not in the least driven by the kind of ambition that drives us. The more I got to know them, and the more time I spent with them, the more I understood that this was a totally legitimate attitude to life, and why not?
John Burdett
#7. The world other than as advertised can be an amazing place.
John Burdett
#9. Don't ask me when I first mastered the obvious.
John Burdett
#10. Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id.
John Burdett
#11. You don't understand. I only prostitute the part of the body that isn't important, and nobody suffers except my karma a little bit. I don't do big harm. You prostitute your mind. Mind is seat of Buddha. What you do is very very bad. You should not use your mind in that way
John Burdett
#12. Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.
John Burdett
#13. In the West, we've lost our intuitive understanding of how poverty shapes thinking.
John Burdett
#14. Farang, I'll bet you Wall Street against a Thai mango he'll be back, if for no other reason than to play the card of virile youth against Hudson's superior rank and thus restore his ego after that humiliating reprimand.
John Burdett
#15. To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to cultivate them.
John Burdett
#16. Sincerity is the first casualty of capitalism. We
John Burdett
#17. We do not look on death the way you do, farang. My closest colleagues grasp my arm and one or two embrace me. No one says sorry. Would you be sorry for a sunset?
John Burdett
#18. When you notice light seeping into your coffin, it's hard to go on pretending that you're still dead.
John Burdett
#19. I don't want enlightenment, I want him. Sorry Buddha, I loved him more than you.
John Burdett
#20. The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.
John Burdett
#21. 'Shun security,' I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. 'Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn't agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.'
John Burdett
#22. There are plenty of brilliant people who are too stressed out to read challenging literary novels.
John Burdett
#23. Expecting to be wrong about most things most of the time brings, finally, the kind of humility that leads to peace. I think.
John Burdett
#24. I discovered that Thailand was one of those countries, like Sri Lanka and India, where memory of past lives used to be commonplace. Go back a few generations, and you find people talking about earlier lives with total certainty.
John Burdett
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