You’ve seen people live perfectly happily within their less than perfect unions

Wouldn’t your unhappiness be just the same as here? No, it wouldn’t. It would exist within the claustrophobia of no choice, rather than the agoraphobia of open options. It would have different dimensions, different weight. But surely an incompatible marriage is unacceptable. An American notion. A universal notion. Women in Bengal rebel against bad marriages, for God’s sake. Women in Bengal don’t rebel against emotional incompatibility. They wouldn’t understand what you mean. But I’m not in Bengal! If you were in Poland, you’d be making a sensible accommodation to your situation. You’ve seen people live perfectly happily within their less than perfect unions.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 230

There is still room in hell for you; we don't want our heaven crammed

We are the sweet selected few
All others may be damned
There is still room in hell for you
We don't want our heaven crammed

Baptist hymn, unknown. Quoted in A. Bloom, 'Ecumenism' [1973], Sobornost 37:1 (2005), 14

The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness

In our highly ideological times, even nostalgia has its politics. The conservatives of the sentiments believe that recovering their own forgotten history is an antidote to shallowness. The ideologues of the future see attachment to the past as that most awful of all monsters, the agent of reaction. It is to be extracted from the human soul with no quarter or self-pity, for it obstructs the inevitable march of events into the next Utopia. Only certain Eastern European writers, forced to march into the future too often, know the regressive dangers of both forgetfulness and clinging to the past. But then, they are among our world’s experts of mourning, having lost not an archaeological but a living history.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 115

So they could remain within their old nationality even at the cost of leaving home

They made this journey on a rattling truck filled with potato sacks and other people trying as quickly as possible to cross the new borders so they could remain within their old nationality even at the cost of leaving home.

E. Hoffman, Lost in Translation (1989), 8

Nowadays most long novels are bad

Besides, nowadays most long novels are bad. It was different a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today life moves faster, its parts are less connected; one assumes of most interesting events and relations (however intense) that they will be of no greater length or complication than can be described in twenty or thirty pages.

A. Lurie, Real People (1969), Collected edition (1999), 375

The Hungarians are more honourable and cleaner infidels

The Hungarians are Protestants while the Austrians are Catholics. Therefore these two infidel groups are opposites to one another, despite their both being Christians. ... In short, though both are unbelievers without faith, the Hungarians are more honourable and cleaner infidels. They do not wash their faces every morning with their urine as the Austrians do, but wash their faces every morning with water as the Ottomans do.

Evliya Celebi, Book of Travels 7.3, ed. & tr. R.Dankoff & S. Kim, An Ottoman Traveller (2010), 230-31

As for coffee: it is an innovation

As for coffee: it is an innovation; it prevents sleep; it dulls the generative powers; and coffee houses are dens of sedition.

Evliya Celebi, Book of Travels 1.6, ed. & tr. R.Dankoff & S. Kim, An Ottoman Traveller (2010), 25