Experience

by Martin Amis

This is where we really go when we die: into the hearts of those who remember us. And all our hearts were bursting with her.

Beautiful metaphor from Martin on where we go when we die. Into the hearts of those we love. This requires no spirituality or mysticism

where there was grass there would also, necessarily, be serpents.

Applicable in many contexts

This is just to show you whose boss around here. It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak, Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak, And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak. You can face up to it like a man, Or snivvle and blubber like a baby. That’s up to you. Nothing to do with Me. If you take it in the right spirit, You can have a bloody marvelous life, With the great rewards courage brings, And the beauty of accepting your LOT. And think how much good it’ll do your Mum and Dad, And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower, To be stopped being complacent. Make sure they baptise you, though, In case some murdering bastard

Brilliant kingsley poem on the cruelty and absurdity of death

rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me).

Summarizes How i am since marla was born

‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything.’

But writers write far more penetratingly than they live. Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang.

‘Courage . . . means not scaring others.’

Great quote on courage

Allan Bloom: ‘It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about.

Allan bloom quote on indifference of universe

‘Old age, inevitable and inescapable, is terrible and menacing, for it never gives anything back, it returns nothing!’

Great quote from dead souls on old age emphasising how old age only takes and doesnt give back

In his choice of words my father is not a delegator, particularly in accounts of his own state of mind.

Wonderfully eloquent way to write that someone has an exgebsive vocabularly

‘It is the single-minded intensity,’ he wrote to Larkin, ‘even more than the brutish self-interest, of babies’ crying that angers me most; it is as if they feared that by omitting to yell for a second or two, they might be deprived of a drop of milk.’

Comical observation on babies crying

Unfelt, unregistered, pain is still working the room, death is still working the room. The air is heavy with trapped pain. But no one cries or moans; all are prone and silent,

‘Life is mainly grief and labour

Kingsley amis quote on life