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He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really ...more

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When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and...more

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Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belie...more

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For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memor...more

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And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. ...more

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Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the...more

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If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had h...more

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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your n...more

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Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what poi...more

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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't ...more

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Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised ...more

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He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

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Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He define...more

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To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

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There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.