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The two saving graces of explosions are that from the outside they’re pretty and from the inside they’re quick.
There’s a special connection between consciousness and time. Einstein said, ‘Time is an illusion’, and the great Douglas Adams had even greater doubts about lunchtime.
‘People get obsessed with money, even when they already have more than they know what to do with.’
That lazy weakness that often visits on waking after a daytime sleep had me in its grip
Knowledge is power, and I like power. Unfortunately, in this particular game almost all the knowledge is locked up in that extraordinary brain of yours. So, forgive me if I hang on to my secrets a little long.
‘How about a little optimism?’ ‘The optimist sets themself up for disappointment. I’m just aiming for a little realism.
‘So hit me with the but wait, there’s more section of this presentation.’
It’s a scary thing being alone in the dark: cold, wet and lost. But it’s a very different kind of fear to the one you experience when seeing a steel blade in the hands of a man who wants to cut you open with it.
‘Thank God!’ Even atheist scientists are apt to praise the local deity at such moments.
In science it is unwise to think of yourself as the centre of the universe.
I guess some decisions are balanced on such a sharp edge that you just don’t know until that very last moment what you are going to end up doing.
I wondered how many foolish scientists had already triggered the end of time and space in separate incidents across the cloth of our expanding universe.
I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it.
The wild thought that a half-decent chemist could make an excellent bomb out of this stuff crossed my mind. I quickly opted to leave hastily constructed weaponry to MacGyver and looked for somewhere to hide instead.
Years crawl by but once they get behind you in a big old stack, it’s amazing how they seem to have done it in the blink of an eye.
the truth was that money was never something that interested me, and simply having a lot of it didn’t change the fact that I really couldn’t be arsed to spend it.
I told Mia that this had been the time I was going to allocate to catching up on all those great fantasy books I never managed to get round to reading. She told me that they were still publishing great fantasy books, with more coming out each week than I could read in a year. I told her to shut up.
Sure, the world had a lot of shitty stuff in it that wasn’t worth saving, but it also had Mia in it, and my mother, too, I guess, and then there were baby turtles, rainforests, John, Simon, Elton, little children in playgrounds. Not necessarily in that order, but you get the picture.
‘What were those numbers again?’ I asked. He didn’t ask which numbers. ‘4, 17, 17, 6, 1, 2, 11, 3, 5, 3.’ ‘Thanks.’ I’d forgotten them long ago. Simon never forgot anything. That’s a blessing and a curse.
‘Thanks, man.’ I stood and set a hand to his shoulder as he got up beside me, ready to go. Simon surprised me then. He broke the habit of a lifetime and, as though trying to speak an alien language for which his tongue had not been designed, he opened his arms and clamped me in a hug that felt more like an act of violence, but which was obviously well intentioned. He left with a cryptic quote that I was still nerdy enough to identify as coming from The Search for Spock. The one about weighing an individual’s needs against those of everyone else.
Love had come into my world unexpected, unannounced, like a gentle breeze, hardly noticed at first, yet where it wandered it moved everything. Now there was no end to where I would let it carry me.
‘Tempus fugit!’
Memory is all we are, I said. So don’t forget me.
‘Twenty-five years.’ At first they had crawled by so slowly and so sweetly that it felt as though I had been given an eternity. Lately, though, the months had zipped past, blurred by the speed of their passage, like trees seen from a train. And now, with them stacked behind me, with their weight against my shoulders, I felt no more ready to go than I had at fifteen.
Always the child standing there wearing an old man’s clothes, an old skin hanging from old bones, and wondering where the days went, remembering how marvellous it had been to fritter away so many slow and sunny days. And wanting more.
We get one shot. However you play it out. Fast forward it, rewind, it’s still the same: a single shot.
There’s a certain pain associated with doing even things you love and knowing that it is for the last time.
She kept me from vanishing into the weird world of mathematics that called to me constantly. She kept me real, in contact with other humans and what it meant to be human. In a small but very real way, she saved me every day.
A dying child is a mirror. What you find to say to them is a truer reflection of who you are than anything you’ll see over your toothbrush.
Sometimes knowledge isn’t power. Sometimes it’s just a burden.
‘It is easy to fool an audience. Harder to deceive a friend. Hardest of all to trick yourself.
Sometimes you just need to rip the bandage off, right?’ I had the edge of an idea, but it was the nebulous sort of idea that words would undermine. Logical examination would reduce it to meaningless corners.
‘All good stories come full circle in the end. You should know that, Nick.’
The universe doesn’t care about time. We care about time. Because we remember.
The stories of our lives don’t behave themselves; they don’t have clear beginnings, and even death isn’t a clear end. We just do what we can, we take what kindness and joy we find along the way, we ride the rapids as best we’re able.
