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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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What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into...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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Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.

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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

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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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Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asl...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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Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how...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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Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto ev...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