I don't want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!
So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.
Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am.
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.
That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all
The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.
You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!
He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.
It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.
What went wrong? Nothing and everything.
I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.
I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.
I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.
It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.
When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.
Like all books that have that kind of momentum, it starts from word of mouth.
Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.
Everything's complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.
But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
Reading begets reading.
But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?
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