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ornery
filial
He said that her heart must have simply ‘run out of beats.’
his mood tuned down an octave,
in that customary way of single men for whom time is something to fill rather than spend.
shout machine-gun guesses
he preferred to play a minor part in someone else’s story rather than being his own star.
spent her career lobbing encouragement in soft little underarm pitches for others to swing at.
capitulate
Hungry Paul lived on a knife edge between a passion for board games and an aversion to instruction booklets.
Dad and I were so absorbed that we ate a whole Toblerone between us—one of the big ones that you get at the airport.’
How can we just walk around leading normal lives when we know that that sort of thing is going on above our heads? We’d all be a little less precious about our lot if we truly appreciated that the whole thing was going to end up as some sort of tiny full stop eventually. I suppose you just have to trust the science, but it is blind faith really beyond a certain point, at least as far as I’m concerned.’
the trick is to know how much of the world to let in, without becoming overwhelmed. The universe, as Edwin Hubble taught us, is a hostile place.’
Even among close friends, there are still some thoughts that ought to be allowed to ripen in private.
He tried to keep in mind the advice his mother had once given him, that he should take his work seriously but not personally.
precipitous
It had been quite some time since Leonard had been a plus one. In fact, these days he was decidedly not himself, so ‘minus one’ was closer to the mark.
Loneliness begets loneliness.
He saw society as a sort of chemistry set, full of potentially explosive ingredients which, if handled correctly could be fascinating and educational, but which was otherwise best kept out of reach of those who did not know what they were doing.
ubiquitous,
the ghost of inspiration enter the room.
As he lay there on the threshold between reflection and sleep, an idea came to him from that special place that ideas come from.
very much a man of his generation and was terrified of leaving a restaurant hungry.
to check that it had not curdled overnight.
Though we may be a species that prizes great minds, we are also terrified of and by our thoughts.
With no distractions, one thought billiards another, and an endless internal monologue drowns out the rest of life, bringing dissonance to silence, restlessness to stillness, and anxiety to forethought. A certain type of person, isolated and unsuited to long daily periods of reflection, will eventually think themselves to madness.
its tongue was hanging out like a rasher.
he would later wake with that drugged feeling that comes with a second sleep.
Random, unsorted mental echoes, not yet sweetened into nostalgia.
All I can say is best of luck with it. If you need any advice on how to mess it up, just ask.’
catatonic
always suffered from writer’s block when it came to small talk.
What I learned is that everyone in your life has an invisible number on their foreheads, which represents the number of times you will see them again. It might be zero or one, or it could be a thousand, but it’s a number. We don’t have unlimited time with people. I don’t mean that in a morbid way. It’s a lesson for us to appreciate people while we can. Don’t put people off. Don’t think you can make up the time later.
we can plan and calculate as much as we like, but romance never enters our lives on terms of our own choosing.
he would at least benefit from the confidence that comes from knowing that the forces of nature are generally on the side of those who try something new.
already pretending to be someone a little different, as people tend to do in the early days.
ulterior
perspicacious
It may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open.
he couldn’t help but notice that things seemed to be moving on without him. This hit him with an unexpected heaviness.
once life had changed, once the people in your life started slipping away from you, as inevitably happens, then north, south, east and west all move from their fixed points on the compass.
Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience. But to deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated until it became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass. And
he had discovered that he was less critical of people when he allowed them in. People, it turns out, weren’t so bad.
She had a lovely way of laughing and speaking at the same time, just keeping it together enough until the end of the sentence when she exploded.
am I just a friend or something disappointingly platonic like that?’
you’re not about projecting something, you really are for real—and I suppose I realised how hard it is to find that, to find gentleness in the world.
he decided to walk home on that cloudless night, with a light heart and nothing above him but the universe.
It is hard to appreciate now, but there was once a time before mobile phones and text messages when people communicated with each other by sticking notes to refrigerators using magnets.
there is no better cure for one’s own worries than to help someone else with theirs.
phlegmatic
