Paul Burry

“And Keith felt it again (he felt it several times a day): the tingle of license. Everyone could swear now, if they wanted to. The word *fuck* was available to both sexes. It was like a sticky toy, and it was there if you wanted it.”
― Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

“My freedom therefore requires that I can ask myself what I *should* do with my time. Even when I am utterly absorbed in what I do, what I say, and what I love, the possibility of this question must be alive in me. Being engaged in my activities, I must run the risk of being bored--otherwise my engagement would be a matter of compulsive necessity. Being devoted to what I love, I must run the risk of losing it or giving it up--otherwise there would be nothing at stake in maintaining and actively relating to what I love. Most fundamentally, I must live in relation to my irrevocable death--otherwise I would believe that my time is infinite and there would be no urgency in dedicating my life to anything.

The condition of our freedom, then, is that we understand ourselves as finite. Only in light of the apprehension that we will die--that our lifetime is indefinite but finite--can we ask ourselves what we ought to do with our lives and put ourselves at stake in our activities. This is why all religious visions of eternity, as we shall see, ultimately are visions of *unfreedom.*”
― Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom

“But first the past. Lily and Keith broke up because Lily wanted to act like a boy. That was the heart of the matter, really: girls acting like boys was in the air, and Lily wanted to try it out. So they had their first big row (its theme, ridiculously, was religion), and Lily announced *a trial separation*. The words came at him like a jolt of compressed air: such trials, he knew, were almost always a complete success. After two days of earnest misery, in his terrible room in the terrible flat in Earls Court, after two days of *desolation*, he phoned her and they met up, and tears were shed--on both side of the café table. She told him to be evolved about it.”
― Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

“It must make you feel nice and young to say that being a man means nothing and being a woman means nothing and what matters is being a...person. How about being a spider, Gwyn. Let's imagine you're a spider. You're a spider, and you've just had your first serious date. You're limping away from that now, and you're looking over your shoulder, and there's your girlfriend, eating one of your legs like a chicken drumstick. What would you say? I know. You'd say: I find I never think in terms of male spiders or in terms of female spiders. I find I always think in terms of...spiders”
― Martin Amis, The Information