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1 " The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realization that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet nose is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which connoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you. "
― Terry Pratchett , Moving Pictures (Discworld, #10; Industrial Revolution, #1)
2 " Do you want to know why I don't like the so-called connoisseurs of arts? I hate hypocrisy. I'll give you an example: if the movie is colored and tells us about two friends who sit in the pool, fart into the water, get out of the pool and fart into each other's face it will be thrash, a lack of a culture and a third-rate comedy. But if the movie is black-and-white and tells us about two friends who cross the desert and peeing on each other, shit on the sand, and then they eat each other's shit, and on top of that they fucking each other's ass it will be a brilliant art house movie. "
― Ilze Falb , Thinkilzing
3 " They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of pleasures but, connoisseurs of unreality as they were, they could not bear the crude weight, the rank smell and the ripe taste of real flesh. It is always a dangerous experiment to act out a fantasy; they had undertaken the experiment rashly and had failed… "
― Angela Carter , Love
4 " An old walrus-faced waiter attended to me; he had the knack of pouring the coffee and the hot milk from two jugs, held high in the air, and I found this entrancing, as if he were a child's magician. One day he said to me - he had some English - " Why are you sad?" " I'm not sad," I said, and began to cry. Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous." You should not be sad," he said, gazing at me with his melancholy, leathery walrus eyes. " It must be the love. But you are young and pretty, you will have time to be sad later." The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all the kinds. This is why they have bidets. " It is criminal, the love," he said, patting my shoulder. " But none is worse. "
5 " The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him." We are then able to answer in some manner the question, " Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small." When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great." Now, the error of Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern; but he never thought of looking inside the thief. "
6 " Cats are connoisseurs of comfort. "
― James Herriot , James Herriot's Cat Stories
