...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

I have a really low boredom threshold.

Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.

You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.

But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?