That's all I have to do, she thought to herself. All I have to do is open my eyes.

The idea was so simple it made her weep. She could feel the tears pressing between her locked lashes and running down her cheeks.

Open your eyes, she told herself.

Clive Barker, Abarat, & probably not making much sense out of context.

... and affection it is that brings me here, no doubt. Even a frigid, self-sufficing man needs something of this interchange if he is not to die in his unmechanical part: natural philosophy, music, dead men's conversation, is not enough.

(Stephen, in PCTo say I don't like Stephen as a character would not be true at all, but I recognise too much ( Read more... )

Cold. Alarm at six, crawled out of bed, shivered, checked the news website for the weather (still no thermometer after four years in this flat), and, wtf, not even three degrees; morning run canceled, coffee postponed, back to bed, woke up again at nine, cranky, disorientated and more tired than three hours earlier.

It went downhill from there, ( Read more... )

Quoted from an interview with Stephen Fry, here:

Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and mathematician, got into terrible trouble by writing quite fearsome articles against the first World War when it began. He got all these letters from people who said, “My child is prepared to lay down their life for their country. Don't you think that ( Read more... )

( Some rambling disjointed thoughts about TM's Felix Krull )

love is either magnificent, passionate and unexpected or it's best replaced for great literature, travelling, ideals. fuck all that needing to find someone. nobody needs to find anyone. if there's anyone to be found then it was never there, never meant to be, as love can only be true if it feels that there was never a begining. it's like rain; it ( Read more... )

Unser Menschenhirn, unser Leib und Gebein - Mosaiken seien sie derselben Elementarteilchen, aus denen Sterne und Sternstaub, die dunklen, getriebenen Dunstwolken des interstellaren Raumes beständen.

(Thoman Mann, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull)

Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain, perhaps the greatest of all time. The ( Read more... )

whinewhinewhine

Right. I'm officially an internet addict (as if I hadn't known this before) - I'm not happy unless I can whine on lj ( Read more... )

[Following a comment posted in czaria's journal.... (& also a discussion I had with Manuela's boyfriend recently.)]

The fact is we are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. [from ( Read more... )

Opened my book of poems by W.H.Auden today and the first thing I saw was this, which struck me as a strangely beautiful image:

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.[[Another random, and really rather stupid, thing, I caught George Michael's 'Amazing' video on tv today, and ( Read more... )