Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?

clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

The learnin' mind is the livin' mind, Meronym said, an any sort o'Smart is truesome Smart, old Smart or new high Smart or low.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid