Tom

“Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse - we can't remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“I have embraced you and henceforth possess you to myself, and when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“We can’t conserve anything, and especially not social relations, without altering their nature, arresting some part of their interaction with time in an unnatural way.”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. ‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain