Two Types of People

It is probably possible to divide the human race into butter-eaters and non-butter-eaters. I’m not sure what the division really says about us (and no wise man should go around looking for more divisions than we already have), but I am sure where my sympathies lie. I find cold butter simply irresistible.

-Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 151.

Three Sorts of People

Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people--those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food.

-Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse, 7.

Connectors

When [Lois] Weisberg looks out at the world or Roger Horchow sits next to you on an airplane, they don't see the same world that the rest of us see. They see possibility, and while most of us are busily choosing whom we would like to know, and rejecting the people who don't look right or who live out near the airport, or whom we haven't seen in sixty-five years, Lois and Roger like them all.

-Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point, 53.

The Truly Wide Taste...

The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in the cross-section of humanity whom one has to meet every day. In my experience it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate, the people who "happen to be there". Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.

-C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 37.