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There is always an element of unpredictability in even the most predictable things. And if you lived like it wasn’t there, then life would pull the rug from under you, so you might as well embrace the .14159.
I always think that the quickest way to understand someone is to look at what’s on their bookshelves. Especially if they are honest bookshelves,
Someone once told me the way to die happy is to die complete. To live like you eat a delicious meal. To devour and enjoy every course so that when you have finished you are full, and enjoyed every mouthful, but aren’t too sad there is no more.
To properly know mathematics is to know the only thing that can be assuredly known. Politics and sociology and history and psychology have facts you have to interpret. But in mathematics facts are just facts. There is no arguing. There is no left-wing or right-wing algebra. There is no sin in geometry and no guilt in trigonometry.
When you had a childhood surrounded by saints it was easy to feel like a sinner.
There are no real excuses except feelings.
Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.
But there was a humility there too. You bowed your head. You said sorry when you didn’t need to. You said sorry for things you hadn’t even done. I always find it interesting when people do that. It is like an admission that everyone in the world is a little to blame for everything.
what I want you to know is that I like you enough that I don’t need you to like me back.
And I had that feeling I often get with mathematics, where the answer is there, and you know the answer is there, it is in your brain and taking shape but not fully visible.
The trouble with having a change of scene is that if you get there and find that you feel just the same, then you really are trapped.
The point of desperation is often the point of truth. When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.
Everything looks obvious after history has tamed it.
Mental fortitude and emotional sympathy.
‘Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.’
People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.
You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind.
She said you saved her life.’ I shook my head. ‘I just gave her some company.’ Lieke smiled a smile of infinite complexity. ‘That is sometimes all it takes.’
I liked the way she spoke to me as if I wasn’t defined by my age and appearance. She was the rarest of things. A human devoid of prejudice.
That is one great thing about having someone by your side. They are a shock absorber to the madness of experience.
our silent thoughts aren’t contained in our minds any more than light is contained in a lightbulb.
suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion.
All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.
Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities. I was drawn to mathematics because of its certainties, because I wanted closed doors, and simplicity, but life isn’t like that. And nor, in fact, is mathematics. You can’t ever fully unweave the rainbow, because mathematics and science and essential truth
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if you want to lead a full and aware life, you should head towards possibility, towards mystery and movement, towards travel or change, because when you find the universality within that, you find yourself. Your ever-moving self. You arrive in the act of leaving. Of staying open, always, to the possibility that the simple things we tell ourselves may all be wrong.
‘I am not special,’ I said. Those were the easiest four words I had ever said.
