″Time must be explicitly managed, like money. My students would sometimes roll their eyes at what they called ‘Pauschisms,’ but I stand by them. Urging students not to invest time on irrelevant details, I’d tell them: ‘It doesn’t matter how well you polish the underside of the banister.’ ″
“If we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes.”
“It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about - war, work, marriage, democracy, love, it all fails because everybody gives up trying after a while, we can’t help ourselves.”
“Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every living organism is bred to be slaughtered.”
“But what does it matter which? If one of your parents killed the other, would it really matter to the mother of the boy you were going to marry, which way round it was?”
“This is the way I used to feel in Barbados, Kit thought with surprise. Light as air somehow. Here I’ve been working like a slave, much harder than I’ve ever worked in the onion fields, but I feel as though nothing mattered except just to be alive right at this moment.”
″‘I am the Muskrat,’ said the wretched creature faintly. ‘A philosopher, you know. I should just like to point out that your bridge-building activities have completely ruined my house in the river bank, and although it ultimately doesn’t matter what happens, I must say even a philosopher does not care for being soaked to the skin.‘”
“It was only a hole I lived in, but I was happy there. Of course, it’s all the same to a philosopher whether he is happy or not, but it was a good hole...”
“Where am I going? I don’t quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.”
“There isn’t any backstory as to why Ernest is caring for Celestine as he would his own daughter, but it doesn’t really matter why ... what matters is the tender love between the two of them. ”