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."