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Even in a lawless inferno, man has to give himself some honour, he’s so desperate to separate himself from the beasts.
Because out there in the real world, freedom means you have to admit authorship, even when your story turns out to be a stinker.
there’s freedom in looking crazy.
It’s the chasm between the healthy and the sick that you just can’t breach.
Meanwhile the wind was threatening to toss me into the harbour. I knew then and there that pondering the significance of an action in the middle of the action is just not right.
The crowd seemed to shout with one voice, reminding me how man is often stupid alone, but in packs he is absolutely cretinous.
because at the end of the day what you’re really missing is just time itself.
Banal list of promises to myself numbered an even fifty & as I tore them up I thought New Year’s resolutions are a confession that all along we know the fault of our unhappiness lies w/ us & not w/ others.
a man giggles at something puerile and his body glows from the joy, does it matter that it was caused not by a profound artwork but by a rerun of Bewitched?
Silence that has been commanded is still very noisy.
Which is why, by the way, you should never waste your time giving the human race an allegorical tale – in less than one generation they’ll turn it into historical data, complete with eyewitnesses.
but when you put two sarcastic comments side by side, they just sound nasty.
No, I just can’t convince myself that the soul is anything other than the romantic name we have given to consciousness so we can believe it doesn’t tear or stain.
I didn’t think anybody who had to demand respect ever got it.
Does anyone go to the grave satisfied? True satisfaction can’t exist as long as there’s one itch left to scratch. And I don’t care who you are, there’s always an itch.
There are far too many people who don’t have anything to do or anywhere to go and who would like nothing better than to squander their whole lives chatting.
Becoming a public figure is like befriending a Rottweiler with meat in your pockets.
but then fiction has a habit of making the real world seem made up.
Most people overseas think the capital of Australia is Sydney or Melbourne, but what they don’t know is that in the 1950s the village idiots opened their own village and called it Canberra.
In Australia, the worst insult you can slander a person with, and the easiest way to dismiss every fibre of their being, is to call them a do-gooder. A do-gooder – let’s be clear – is a person who does good or wants to do good. Let’s be clear about this too, just so there are no misunderstandings: in the eyes of the slanderer, this is definitely an insult, not a compliment, and to be a do-gooder is something shameful, unlike in other places, such as heaven, where it’s considered an asset.
Because the past is always the worst thing happening to the present at any given time.
It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.
they don’t have enough insight into human psychology to know that escape is evidence only of fear.
The thing that makes a man go crazy isn’t loneliness or suffering after all – it’s being kept in a state of perpetual dread.
He might have been his own worst enemy, but he was my worst enemy too, and I’d be damned if I was going to wait patiently by the riverbank, as in the Chinese proverb, for his corpse to float by. I wanted to see him die, and bury him and pat the earth with my bare hands. I say this as a loving son.
‘You’ve probably worked out by now that if you think courageous thoughts, you will cross busy streets without looking, and if you think sadistic, venal thoughts, you will find yourself pulling out the chair every time someone is about to sit down. You are what you think. So if you don’t want to turn into your father, you don’t want to think yourself into a corner like he did – you need to think yourself into the open, and the only way to do that is to enjoy not knowing whether you’re right or wrong, play the game of life without trying to work out the rules. Stop judging the living, enjoy
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That shit me. People always say, ‘It’s good to be a part of something bigger than yourself.’ But you already are. You’re part of a huge thing. The whole of humanity. That’s enormous. But you can’t see it, so you pick, what? An organisation? A culture? A religion? That’s not bigger than you. It’s much, much smaller!
‘People aren’t looking for answers,’ he often said. ‘They’re looking for facts to prove their case.’
