I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.
That’s why I love talking and teaching: the act of reproducing ideas out loud reinforces them in the head. If, every time you read a complex book or idea, you had to explain it to someone else, you’d never forget it.
The puzzle that besets me is best expressed by the following statements. a: None of what follows ever happened b: All of what follows is entirely true.
Forget him. What is treasure? Or Briseis, or honor, or anything? Next to the life of the one I loved best and dearest? My beloved, my only Patroclus.
Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge;.
I always feel a fool when in the company of people who work for a living. It brings out my startling lack of common sense.
Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.
And for the first time I looked into his eyes. They were blue, not light blue, but a darker blue. Not so dark as sapphire blue, not so bright as china blue. They were romantically blue. Lyrically blue. They swam and I swam in them.
Hermes, the Psychopomp.
If that kind of poetry doesn’t make your bosom heave then I fear we shall never be friends.
You may be gold, and we poor ordinary men may be of bronze, but ask any solier out there which metal they’d rather have for a sword blae or a spearpoint.
Cambridge produces martyrs and Oxford burns them.
The action is played out on the golden horizon between reality and legend, the beguiling penumbra where fable and fact coexist.
I hate it when people say swearing isn’t necessary. Things not being necessary is what makes life interesting, the little extras in life.
Sometimes political correctness exists more in the furious minds of its enemies than in reality, which gets n with compromise and common sense without too much hysteria.
Pomposity and indignation grow in old age, like nostril hairs and earlobes.
Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.
Since my earliest years I felt nothing but shame for the useless casing of flesh I inhabit.
My lifelong battle to control cabling began at this time. All the cables I have ever owned would stretch to the moon and back. Except they would not be able to because they would fail to connect up with each other. Anyone can write a story in which humans can teleport, travel in time and make themselves invisible A future in which there are cable compatibility standards, that would be real science fiction.
To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters – to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.