Daniele Vare

“Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have your way.”

“Western funerals: black hearses, and black horses, and fast-fading flowers. Why should black be the colour of death? Why not the colours of a sunset?”

“There is a birch-rod kept behind the looking-glass in the schoolroom, and every now and then it is brought out and used, for no reason that really matters. This generally happens when there is a yellow wind. . . . Most people in North China suffer from nerves during the winter months, when the air is so dry that one gets an electric shock every time that one touches metal, or takes off ones furs. The nervous tension becomes greater before a dust storm, known locally as a 'yellow wind.”

“To many people I have no doubt that it appears merely silly. I once found it expressed in a rather amusing way in a Russian Book called Dal Zoviet, which means the lure of far horizons. The author is Galinischev Kutuzoff [Golenischev-Kutuzov], and he tells of a man in Northern Mongolia who goes out of his yurt every morning to breathe the free air of the steppes and enjoy the immensity and the solitude. But one day he feels an uncomfortable sense of oppression, almost as if he could not breathe. He looks about to find the reason. And there, across the undulating grasslands, is a line of telegraph poles. And after the place never the same to him again.”

“I have done the journey between Tientsin and Peking so many times that I recognize even the stray dogs (known locally as wonks) that frequent the platforms in the hopes of picking up something thrown out from the carriage windows.”

“He was a specialist in Feng Shui; that is to say, he was consulted as to the correct ubication and orientation of houses and temples, in relation to the spirits of wind and water.”

“The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself.”

“Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way.”