Quotes

Destiny is not a matter of chance,
it is a matter of choice;
it is not a thing to be waited for,
it is a thing to be achieved.

it may not always be so; and i say
that if your lips, which i have loved, should touch
another’s, and your dear strong fingers clutch
his heart, as mine in time not far away;
if on another’s face your sweet hair lay
in such silence as i know, or such
great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

if this should be, i say if this should be—
you of my heart, send me a little word;
that i may go unto him, and take his hands,
saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then shall i turn my face and hear one bird
sing terribly afar in the lost lands

To be a star, you must shine your own light, follow your own path, And don’t worry about the darkness, for that is when the stars shine brightest.

Women would be amazed if they knew what men desire about them. Yes, of course, they want to see women naked and supine and melting, but male desire is far more readily stimulated by what the oblique glance discovers: the parted lips, the micron of eyelash which the mascara brush missed, the changing angle and shadow of cleavage, the bra-strap alternately displayed and covered up, the ripe-camembert plumpness at the edge of hips. There is, inside every adult man, a relentless Peeping Tom, a perennial 14-year-old boy, still amazed by the phenomenon of women on display, flagging their sexuality, their availability, with every square inch of visible flesh, clothing, make-up and curve.
…
We desire the personality that we discern in the walk, the clothes, the laugh … We look, and sigh, and wish to do certain things to her, first urgently, then luxuriantly, and keep doing it indefinitely; but we also hunger to have her do certain things to us, unimaginable though it may seem – we want her to want us. We don’t just want her surrender, like a slave captured in battle; we want her approbation, her adoration; we want to enchant her to desire us back. For, no matter how humble we feel before the dizzying fact of female beauty, men are just as narcissistic as women.

I miss her smell and the way she tastes. It’s a mystery of human chemistry and I don’t understand it. Some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.

A computer comes in between: like a car, but magnified a thousand-fold. It has its fingernails wedged far deeper into your life. Your computer is a backup of your soul, a multi-layered, menu-driven representation of who you are, who you care about, and how you sin. If you spend an evening skating around the web looking at naked ladies, your trail is there in the browser’s history log and in the disk cache – not to mention all the sites that logged your IP address as you passed through, so they can spam you until the end of time. If you exchange the occasional flirtatious email with a co-worker but carefully throw them all away, you’ve still done wrong until you Hail Mary the command to actually empty your software’s trash.
Even if you think you’re being clever and throw everything away, emptying the trash or recycler, you aren’t out of the woods. All that happens when you ‘delete’ a file is that the computer throws away the reference to it – like destroying the file card that refers to a library book on the shelves, telling the visitor where to go find it. The book itself is still there, and if you go looking you can come upon it or track it down. It’s like a man writing notes in pencil on a huge piece of paper. If you blind him, the notes are still there. He can’t put his finger on them, can’t show you where each one is, but they remain. If he keeps making notes (if you keep saving new files, in other words), he will start writing over the originals. His new notes, his new experiences, extend over sections of the original files, making it impossible to return what once was, to understand or even remember what happened first, what made his life like it is. Sections of these files remain, however, hidden and lost, but real – the computer’s earlier experience; severed from the outside world but still inhabiting portions of the disk like ghosts and memories, mixed up with the here and now. We’re like that

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters

But now I see this number winking at me on the dashboard. And I start to realise how clever this is. It’s a Tamagotchi number. You log in, see your tumblarity’s dropped, and you can’t help but suddenly think “oh my god, my Tumblr’s dying.” There’s almost an urge to do something to feed it, to pipette precious drops of life-giving tumblarity into your Tumblr.

Until, obviously, one day you look at it and say, “ah, fuck it, let’s watch the little bastard die.

Ex-KGB spy buys newspaper for £1. Now THAT’S what I call a slow news day. What next? Former MI5 agent buys pint of milk?