The Sellout - Paul Beatty

"Pops liked to say that he didn’t Anglicize or Africanize my surname, but actualized it, that I was born having reached my full potential and could skip Maslow, third grade, and Jesus."

"Like any “primitive” Negro child lucky enough to reach the formal operational stage, I’ve come to realize that I had a shitty upbringing that I’ll never be able to live down."

"It’s not music that soothes the savage beast but the systematic desensitization. And Father’s voice had a way of relaxing the enraged and allowing them to confront their fears anxiety-free."

"Just because racism is dead don’t mean they still don’t shoot niggers on sight."

"People eat the shit you shovel them. That like the pigs, we all have our heads in the trough. While the hogs don’t believe in God, the American dream, or the pen being mightier than the sword, they do believe in the feed in the same desperate way we believe in the Sunday paper, the Bible, black urban radio, and hot sauce."

"I’m a slave. That’s who I am. It’s the role I was born to play. A slave who just also happens to be an actor. But being black ain’t method acting. Lee Strasberg could teach you how to be a tree, but he couldn’t teach you how to be a nigger."

".... the uniqueness of L.A. sunlight, the ways it pours itself across the sky, golden and sweet, like Vermeer, Monet, and breakfast honey all rolled into one. But the L.A. moonlight, or lack thereof rather, is just as special. When night falls, I mean really falls, the temperature drops twenty degrees and a total amniotic blackness blankets and comforts you like a lover making the bed while you’re still in it, and that brief moment between television sets popping off and back on is the calm before the after-hours strip clubs in Inglewood open, before the cacophony of New Year’s Eve gunshots rings out, before Santa Monica, Hollywood, Whittier, and Crenshaw Boulevards come slowly cruising to life, is when Angelenos take time to pause and reflect. To give thanks to the latenight joints in Koreatown. To Mariachi Square. To chili burgers and pastrami dip sandwiches. To Marpessa, peering through the windshield and squinting at the stars, driving by dead reckoning rather than simply following the road. The tires ground assuredly over the asphalt, the bus rolling through the stratosphere, and when she heard the second pop, Marpessa gave the go-ahead for more music, and before long, Hominy and the rest of the Jack in the Box ballet were again pirouetting in the aisle, singing out loud to Tom Petty."

"...cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a way to control the population. It also makes them more docile."

" “A little black boy is in the kitchen watching his mother fry up some chicken. Seeing the flour, he dabs some on his face. ‘Look at me, Ma,’ he says, ‘I’m white!’ ‘What’d you say?’ says his mama, and the boy says, ‘Look at me, I’m white!’ WHAP! His mama slaps the shit out of him. ‘Don’t you ever say that!’ she says, then tells him to go tell his father what he said to her. Crying hard as Niagara Falls, the boy goes up to his father. ‘What’s wrong, son?’ ‘M-M-Mommy sl-sl-slapped me!’ ‘Why she do that, son?’ his father asks. ‘B-b-because I-I said I was w-w-white.’ ‘What?’ BLAAAAM! His father slaps him even harder than his mama did. ‘Now go tell your grandmother what you said! She’ll teach you!’ So the boy’s crying and shaking and all confused. He approaches his grandmother. ‘Why, baby, what’s wrong?’ she asks. And the boy says, ‘Th-th-they sl-slapped me.’ ‘Why, baby—why they’d do that?’ He tells her his story and when he gets to the end, PIE-YOW! His grandmamma slaps him so hard she almost knocks him down. ‘Don’t you ever say that,’ she says. ‘Now what did you learn?’ The boy starts rubbing his cheek and says, ‘I learned that I’ve been white for only ten minutes and I hate you niggers already!’ "

"Fred says the reason they don’t permit cameras has nothing to do with maintaining decorum and dignity. It’s to protect the country from seeing what’s underneath Plymouth Rock. Because the Supreme Court is where the country takes out its dick and tits and decides who’s going to get fucked and who’s getting a taste of mother’s milk. It’s constitutional pornography in there, and what did Justice Potter once say about obscenity? I know it when I see it."

A Place Called Winter - Patrick Gale

"He remembered, or thought he remembered, walking alongside him on a shingle beach, but it was the difficulty of walking on shingle while holding an adult’s hand that informed the memory, not any paternal warmth."

"Perhaps it wasn’t beauty, ultimately, that won men to women or vice versa, but an ability to make one laugh?"

"Pomposity. Severity. Snobbery. They were all masks for various sorts of fear." 

"Frank could decline any number of Greek verbs and rattle off a sequence of prime numbers, but he could never anticipate the illogical choices of ordinary humans so was forever being made to feel odd by comparison, a situation little aided by his inability to dissemble when politeness required it, or to talk of unimportant matters simply to put others at their ease."

"I cheer myself with the conviction that most men are pretending to a maturity they do not feel. They swagger and pose and grow beards to hide behind, but they spend most of their lives secretly afraid and ill-equipped, as scared of women as they are of one another.’"

"‘I am. Of course I am. I trained up in its systems, but one of the many points on which I disagree with psychiatric medicine is its confidence that it knows what it is doing.’ ‘Doesn’t it?’ ‘No.’ Gideon sat on a bench and Harry sat beside him. ‘Places like Essondale exist because we don’t know what else to do with people who threaten themselves or who frighten us by hearing voices or talking to people who aren’t there. We have sought to catalogue all the ills of the mind, giving them tidy Latin names and subdivisions –dementia praecox and hebephrenic schizophrenia –like so many strange flowers in a sinister corner of a garden, but really they’re of no more use than the fanciful names of the constellations. As for treatments, we pretend we know what we’re doing, using darkness or continuous baths or cold wraps or sedatives, but strictly speaking, it is all experimental and every unfortunate inmate of a place like Essondale is a sad hybrid of untried prisoner and guinea pig.’ He sighed, turned, smiled, and patted Harry’s knee. ‘Sorry, Harry. You got me preaching.’"

"‘When a woman out here dares to accuse a man of . . . assaulting her person, she is nearly always disgraced by the process. While the man walks free to attack again.’ ‘But why?’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, so many reasons. Not the least of which is that the law is a blind woman and the judge usually an unloved old man. The lack of proof or witnesses. The embarrassment of the judge and jury. Her failure to scream loud enough to show she took no pleasure in the proceedings.’"

"‘Trust me. I understand. Gideon has been leading you along a line –so very like a man; so methodical and tidy –but life isn’t made of lines. He is like a traveller who looks left and right but doesn’t think to look behind or above him. Men like that get eaten by cougars.’"

"It was bitter, like biting directly into memory itself. It also rapidly had the odd effect of numbing his mouth, so that he became worried about accidentally biting his tongue. He certainly couldn’t have spoken clearly, even if he swallowed first."

His Bloody Project: Documents relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae - Graeme Macrae Burnet

"The sheep turned in my direction, like a sick old woman too weak to raise her head from the pillow."

"On the way back to Culduie, I offered to once again carry the basket, but Flora explained that it had not been that the basket was burdensome, only that she wished to have me carry it for her."

"It is not the blow that causes greatest distress, but the anticipation of it, and I existed at this time in a state of anxiety which increased with each passing day."

"He lay face down on the earth, his eyes wide, chest pumping like a landed fish. I now had time to properly measure my stroke and when I next brought down my weapon, the blade properly entered his skull with an unpleasant sound like a boot being sucked into a peat-bog."

"‘One man can no more see into the mind of another than he can see inside a stone,’ he said eventually."

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China - Jung Chang

"He would quote the Chinese saying, ‘If you are married to a chicken, obey the chicken; if you are married to a dog, obey the dog."

"My mother’s closest friends were her pets. She had an owl, a black myna bird which could say a few simple phrases, a hawk, a cat, white mice, and some grasshoppers and crickets which she kept in glass bottles."

"He subscribed to a theory that a man over the age of sixty-five should not ejaculate, so as to conserve his sperm, which was considered the essence of a man. Years later my grandmother told my mother, somewhat mysteriously, that through qigong Dr Xia developed a technique which enabled him to have an orgasm without ejaculating. For a man of his age he enjoyed extraordinary health. He was never ill, and took a cold shower every day, even in temperatures of minus 10°F. He never touched alcohol or tobacco, in keeping with the injunctions of the quasi-religious sect to which he belonged, the Zai-li-hui (Society of Reason)."

"The schools for the local children were in dilapidated temples and crumbling houses donated by private patrons. There was no heating. In winter the whole class often had to run around the block in the middle of a lesson or engage in collective footstamping to ward off the cold."

"‘A patient is a human being,’ he used to say. ‘That is all a doctor should think about. He should not mind what kind of a human being he is.’"

"As part of their education, my mother and her classmates had to watch newsreels of Japan’s progress in the war. Far from being ashamed of their brutality, the Japanese vaunted it as a way to inculcate fear. The films showed Japanese soldiers cutting people in half and prisoners tied to stakes being torn to pieces by dogs. There were lingering close-ups of the victims’ terror-stricken eyes as their attackers came at them. The Japanese watched the eleven-and twelve-year-old schoolgirls to make sure they did not shut their eyes or try to stick a handkerchief in their mouths to stifle their screams. My mother had nightmares for years to come."

"In the silky moonlight, my grandmother would tell my mother stories about the moon: the largest shadow in it was a giant cassia tree which a certain lord, Wu Gang, was spending his entire life trying to cut down. But the tree was enchanted and he was doomed to repeated failure."

"A few days later Mr Liu senior suddenly died. In those days a spectacular funeral was very important, particularly if the dead person had been the head of the family. A funeral which failed to meet the expectations of the relatives and of society would bring disapproval on the family. The Lius wanted an elaborate ceremony, not simply a procession from the house to the cemetery. Monks were brought in to read the Buddhist sutra of ‘putting the head down’ in the presence of the whole family. Immediately after this, the family members burst out crying. From then to the day of the burial, on the forty-ninth day after the death, the sound of weeping and wailing was supposed to be heard nonstop from early morning until midnight, accompanied by the constant burning of artificial money for the deceased to use in the other world. Many families could not keep up this marathon, and hired professionals to do the job for them. The Lius were too filial to do this, and did all the keening themselves, with the help of relatives, of whom there were many."

"Policy toward prisoners was an intricate combination of political calculation and humanitarian consideration, and this was one of the crucial factors in the Communists’ victory. Their goal was not just to crush the opposing army but, if possible, to bring about its disintegration. The Kuomintang was defeated as much by demoralization as by firepower."

"‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin,’ he said, ‘the Communists are a disease of the heart.’"

"After hearing each other’s frank accounts of their past lives, my father said he was going to write to the Jinzhou City Party Committee asking for permission to ‘talk about love’ ( tan-lian-ai ) with my mother, with a view to marriage. This was the obligatory procedure. My mother supposed it was a bit like asking permission from the head of the family, and in fact that is exactly what it was: the Communist Party was the new patriarch."

"Now, for those who had ‘joined the revolution’, the Party functioned as the family head. Its criteria were ‘28-7-regiment-1’—which meant that the man had to be at least twenty-eight years old, a Party member for at least seven years, and with a rank equivalent to that of a regimental commander; the ‘1’ referred to the only qualification the woman had to meet, to have worked for the Party for a minimum of one year."

"The need to obtain authorization for an unspecified ‘anything’ was to become a fundamental element in Chinese Communist rule. It also meant that people learned not to take any action on their own initiative. 

"He told her that she must be strong, and that as a young student ‘joining the revolution’ she needed to ‘go through the five mountain passes’—which meant adopting a completely new attitude to family, profession, love, life-style, and manual labour, through embracing hardship and trauma."

"The Party’s all-around intrusion into people’s lives was the very point of the process known as ‘thought reform’. Mao wanted not only external discipline, but the total subjection of all thoughts, large or small. Every week a meeting for ‘thought examination’ was held for those ‘in the revolution’. Everyone had both to criticize themselves for incorrect thoughts and be subjected to the criticism of others."

"Whenever she had time she would cuddle us, gently scratching or tickling us, especially on our elbows, which was intensely pleasurable. Pure heaven for me was putting my head on her lap and having the inside of my ears tickled. Ear-picking was a traditional form of pleasure for the Chinese. As a child, I remember seeing professionals carrying a stand with a bamboo chair on one end and scores of tiny fluffy picks dangling from the other."

"This absurd situation reflected not only Mao’s ignorance of how an economy worked, but also an almost metaphysical disregard for reality, which might have been interesting in a poet, but in a political leader with absolute power was quite another matter. One of its main components was a deep-seated contempt for human life."

"Not long before this he had told the Finnish ambassador, ‘Even if the United States had more powerful atom bombs and used them on China, blasted a hole in the earth, or blew it to pieces, while this might be a matter of great significance to the solar system, it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.’"

"At this parade a slogan was put forward, ‘Capable women can make a meal without food’, a reversal of a pragmatic ancient Chinese saying, ‘No matter how capable, a woman cannot make a meal without food.’ Exaggerated rhetoric had become concrete demands. Impossible fantasies were supposed to become reality."

"‘Self-deception while deceiving others’ ( zi-qi-qi-ren ) gripped the nation. Many people—including agricultural scientists and senior Party leaders—said they saw the miracles themselves. Those who failed to match other people’s fantastic claims began to doubt and blame themselves. Under a dictatorship like Mao’s, where information was withheld and fabricated, it was very difficult for ordinary people to have confidence in their own experience or knowledge."

"‘How much wheat can you produce per mu?’ ‘Four hundred jin’ (about 450 pounds—a realistic amount). Then, beating him: ‘How much wheat can you produce per mu?’ ‘Eight hundred jin.’ Even this impossible figure was not enough. The unfortunate man would be beaten, or simply left hanging, until he finally said: ‘Ten thousand jin .’ Sometimes the man died hanging there because he refused to increase the figure, or simply before he could raise the figure high enough."

"On another occasion there was a giant pig squeezed into a truck. The peasants claimed they had bred an actual pig this size. The pig was only made of papier-mâché, but as a child I imagined that it was real. Maybe I was confused by the adults around me, who behaved as though all this were true. People had learned to defy reason and to live with acting."

"The whole nation slid into doublespeak. Words became divorced from reality, responsibility, and people’s real thoughts. Lies were told with ease because words had lost their meanings—and had ceased to be taken seriously by others."

"In his airy way, he [Mao] defined communism as ‘public canteens with free meals’.... In 1958 the regime effectively banned eating at home."

"‘Father Is Close, Mother Is Close, but Neither Is as Close as Chairman Mao’"

"To show us what life without Mao would be like, every now and then the school canteen cooked something called a ‘bitterness meal’, which was supposed to be what poor people had to eat under the Kuomintang. It was composed of strange herbs, and I secretly wondered whether the cooks were playing a practical joke on us—it was truly unspeakable. The first couple of times I vomited."

"Mao was sowing the seeds for his own deification, and my contemporaries and I were immersed in this crude yet effective indoctrination. It worked partly because Mao adroitly occupied the moral high ground: just as harshness to class enemies was presented as loyalty to the people, so total submission to him was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless. It was very hard to get behind the rhetoric, particularly when there was no alternative viewpoint from the adult population. In fact, the adults positively colluded in enhancing Mao’s cult."

"She never used shampoo from the shops, which she thought would make her hair dull and dry, but would boil the fruit of the Chinese honey locust and use the liquid from that. She would rub the fruit to produce a perfumed lather, and slowly let her mass of black hair drop into the shiny, white, slithery liquid. She soaked her wooden combs in the juice of pomelo seeds, so that the comb ran smoothly through her hair, and gave it a faint aroma. She added a final touch by putting on a little water of osmanthus flowers which she made herself, as perfume had begun to disappear from the shops."

"One day in 1965, we were suddenly told to go out and start removing all the grass from the lawns. Mao had instructed that grass, flowers, and pets were bourgeois habits and were to be eliminated."

"I was extremely sad to see the lovely plants go. But I did not resent Mao. On the contrary, I hated myself for feeling miserable. By then I had grown into the habit of ‘self-criticism’ and automatically blamed myself for any instincts that went against Mao’s instructions."

"Traffic was in confusion for several days. For red to mean ‘stop’ was considered impossibly counter-revolutionary. It should of course mean ‘go’. And traffic should not keep to the right, as was the practice, it should be on the left. For a few days we ordered the traffic policemen aside and controlled the traffic ourselves. I was stationed at a street corner telling cyclists to ride on the left. In Chengdu there were not many cars or traffic lights, but at the few big crossroads there was chaos."

"Because Mao called for girls to be militant, femininity was condemned in the years when my generation was growing up."

"‘Where there is a will to condemn, there is evidence,’ as the Chinese saying has it."

"On the other hand, he [Mao] seemed incapable of repressing his love of fighting: as bloody wars spread across China he said, ‘It is not a bad thing to let the young have some practice in using arms—we haven’t had a war for so long.’"

"In January 1969, every middle school in Chengdu was sent to a rural area somewhere in Sichuan. We were to live in villages among the peasants and be ‘reeducated’ by them. What exactly they were supposed to educate us in was not made specific, but Mao always maintained that people with some education were inferior to illiterate peasants, and needed to reform to be more like them. One of his sayings was: ‘Peasants have dirty hands and cowshit-sodden feet, but they are much cleaner than intellectuals.’"

"Altogether, some fifteen million young people were sent to the country in what was one of the largest population movements in history."

"These and many similar persecutions were typical of Mao’s methods in the Cultural Revolution. Instead of signing death warrants Mao would simply indicate his intentions, and some people would volunteer to carry out the tormenting and improvise the gruesome details. Their methods included mental pressure, physical brutality, and denial of medical care—or even the use of medicine to kill. Death caused in this way came to have a special term in Chinese: po-hai zhi-si ‘persecuted to death’. Mao was fully aware of what was happening, and would encourage the perpetrators by giving his ‘silent consent’ ( mo-xu ). This enabled him to get rid of his enemies without attracting blame. The responsibility was inescapably his, but not his alone. The tormentors took some initiative. Mao’s subordinates were always on the lookout for ways to please him by anticipating his wishes"

"It was a real test of ingenuity to look different and attractive, and yet similar enough to everybody else so that nobody with an accusing finger could pinpoint what exactly was heretical."

"The Cultural Revolution not only did nothing to modernize the medieval elements in China’s culture, it actually gave them political respectability. ‘Modern’ dictatorship and ancient intolerance fed on each other. Anyone who fell foul of the age-old conservative attitudes could now become a political victim."

"All these misfortunes were told to me without much drama or emotion. Here it seemed that even shocking deaths were like a stone being dropped into a pond where the splash and the ripple closed over into stillness in no time."

"Mao offered a magic cure to the peasants: ‘doctors’ who could be turned out en masse barefoot doctors. ‘It is not at all necessary to have so much formal training,’ he said. ‘They should mainly learn and raise their standard in practice.’ On 26 June 1965 he made the remark which became a guideline for health and education: ‘The more books you read, the more stupid you become.’ I went to work with absolutely no training."

"I received five electric shocks in the first month. Like being a barefoot doctor, there was no formal training: the result of Mao’s disdain for education." 

"People who loved learning felt a rapport which bound them together. This was the reaction from a nation with a highly sophisticated civilization which had been subjected to virtual extinction."

"I could understand ignorance, but I could not accept its glorification, still less its right to rule."

"One nurse told me that earlier in the Cultural Revolution the room had been used for the inmates to study Chairman Mao’s works because his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, had ‘discovered’ that Mao’s Little Red Book, rather than medical treatment, was the cure for mental patients. The study sessions did not last long, the nurse told me, because ‘whenever a patient opened his mouth, we were all scared to death. Who knew what he was going to say?’"

"But Mao’s theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred."

A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James

"In Jamaica, what don't go so, go near so."

"Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school."

"I see seven people in one room and one pregnant and people fucking anyway because people so poor that they can't even afford shame and I wait."

"And killing don't need no reason. This is ghetto. Reason is for rich people. We have madness."

"Whamperer tastes just like a Whopper, minus the taste. Even the lettuce knows it can do better."

"The wife finally came around the fact that as long as we're married there are just some things she will never know and she had to get used to what all our wives get used to. Knowing two out of every four facts. Five out of every ten trips. One out of every five deaths."

"Me have rule with woman. If your titty prettier and your body hotter than my women, I'll deal with you. Otherwise fuck off."

"This is the first mistake God make. Time. God was a fool to create time. It's the one thing that even he run out of."

"A man who know him have enemy must be on guard at all times. A man who know him have enemy must sleep with one eye open. But when a man have too many enemies he soon flatten them all down to one level, forget how to tell them apart and start to think every enemy is the same enemy."

"The problem with a book is that you never know what it's planning to do to you until you're too far into it."

"God puts earth far away from heaven because even he can's stand the smell of dead flesh. Death is not a soul catcher or a spirit, it's a wind with no warmth, a crawling sickness."

"Chuck. It is like Chip, Pat, Buck or Jack. I just love these one-punch American names, they sound like apple pie and easy money and you utter them once with so little effort and you're done."

"Sometimes I have to remind him that three feet north of this vagina is a brain."

"People with no plan wait and see. People with a plan see and wait for the right time. The world is not a ghetto and a ghetto is not the world. People in the ghetto suffer because there be people who live for making them suffer. Good time is bad time for somebody too."

"Jamaica can shoot through your veins and it become like every dark sweet thing that is not good for you."

"I used to think old was the first time you bent over and grunted ugh when you straightened back up. Now old is running into enemies too old to fight, where all you got left from an old war is fucking nostalgia. And any kind of nostalgia is something to drink not shoot over."

The Real Thing - Tom Stoppard

"Loving and being loved is unliterary. It’s happiness expressed in banality and lust."

"I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn’t one’s lover. Only two kinds of presence in the world. There’s you and there’s them. I love you so."

"He’s not a writer. He’s a convict. You’re a writer. You write because you’re a writer. Even when you write about something, you have to think up something to write about just so you can keep writing. More well chosen words nicely put together."

"I can’t help some body who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a news paper is censorship, while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech … Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos."

"- Billy: You approve of the class system?
 - Annie: You mean on trains or in general?
 - Billy: In general. Travelling first-class.
 - Annie: There’s no system. People group together when they’ve got something in common. Sometimes it’s religion and sometimes it’s, I don’t know, breeding budgies or being at Eton. Big and small groups over lapping. You can’t blame them. It’s a cultural thing; it’s not classes or system . ( She makes a connection .) There’s nothing really there –it’s just the way you see it. Your perception.
 - Billy: Bloody brilliant. There’s people who’ve spent their lives trying to get rid of the class system, and you’ve done it without leaving your seat."

"You don’t get visited by happiness like being lucky with the weather. The weather is the weather."

" - Henry: .... I suppose that’s the fate of all us artists.
  - Debbie: Death?
  - Henry: People saying they preferred the early stuff."

"Most people think not having it off is fidelity . They think all relationships hinge in the middle. Sex or no sex. What a fantastic range of possibilities. Like an on/off switch. Did she or didn’t she. By Henry Ibsen."

"Persuasive nonsense. Sophistry in a phrase so neat you can’t see the loose end that would unravel it. It’s flawless but wrong. A perfect dud. You can do that with words, bless ’em. How about ‘What free love is free of, is love’? Another little gem."

"It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It’s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy … we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? A sort of knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared –she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain."

"It’s no trick loving somebody at their best . Love is loving them at their worst. Is that romantic? Well, good. Everything should be romantic. Love, work, music, literature, virginity, loss of virginity …"

"I don’t want anyone else but sometimes, surprisingly, there’s someone, not the prettiest or the most available, but you know that in another life it would be her. Or him, don’t you find? A small quickening. The room responds slightly to being entered. Like a raised blind. Nothing intended, and a long way from doing anything, but you catch the glint of being someone else’s possibility, and it’s a sort of politeness to show you haven’t missed it, so you push it a little, well within safety, but there’s that sense of a promise almost being made in the touching and kissing without which no one can seem to say good morning in this poncy business and one more push would do it."

Kokoro - Natsume Sosoki

“Is love really a sin?” I asked abruptly. “Yes, most definitely,” Sensei said, as forcefully as before. “Why?” “You’ll understand soon enough. No, you must already understand it. Your heart is already restless with love, isn’t it?”

"Ah, but you’re restless precisely because there’s no object, you see? You’re driven by the feeling that if only you could find that object, you’d be at peace."

"I’m always amazed at how men can go on and on, happily passing around the empty cup of some futile discussion."

“It’s a shame that an education just gives people the means to chop logic.”

“Giving your children an education has its good and bad points, I must say. You go to the trouble of training them, and then they don’t come home again. It seems to me an education is the easy way to split up a family.”

".... the first moments after it is lit, or taste wine in that instant of the first sip, the impulse of love springs from a single, perilous moment in time..."

".... stated with passionate conviction carries more living truth than some novel observation expressed with cool indifference. It is the force of blood that drives the body, after all. Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects."

".... real love, I firmly believe, is not so different from the religious impulse. Whenever I saw her face, I felt that I myself had become beautiful."

" [It] was perfectly normal for us to maintain separate silences on either side of the doors,

"This thought haunted me, even when my own fear raised the very hairs on my head. It brought the kind of shudder one would feel in setting mercilessly upon a beautiful, innocent flower with a whip."

It's All in Your Head: Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness - Suzanne O'Sullivan

"I recently went to a dinner party where every person bar two, at a table of ten, reported that they had an intolerance of or allergy to at least one foodstuff. Most had developed the allergy in middle age which is not really how an allergy typically behaves. People look for explanations for changes in their bodies, something to account for every unpleasant feeling. There is an unwillingness to accept behavioural or emotional factors, or the effects of ageing, as an explanation. Society and the media are often available to provide a more agreeable answer and to add to the symptom pool available. People are suggestible. If you ask somebody if they have itchy ears as if it is diagnostic of something important, people will search for that symptom in the reaches of their memory and a surprising number will find it there."

"Thirty per cent who go to a rheumatology clinic suffer with pain for which medicine cannot account. Fifty per cent of those who go to a general medical clinic have symptoms that cannot be explained. Sixty per cent of women who go to see a gynaecologist have symptoms for which no cause is found."

"The denial of stress seems to be inherent in conversion disorders. If unpleasant emotions have indeed been converted to a physical symptom, the patient is not always aware that they ever existed in the first place."

"There is no single answer because there is no single cause. Sometimes you just have to figure out what purpose the illness serves, find what is missing and try to replace it."