Sleep

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep.
    Just that, nothing more.
        All the wealthy, unhappy people you’ve ever met take sleeping pills;

                Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

 

 

 

 

Being alive

I like living.
I have sometimes been wildly despairing,
acutely miserable, racked with sorrow,
but through it all I still know quite certainly
that just to be alive is a grand thing.

        Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

 

 

 

Crispus Attucks Day

He is one of the most important figures in African-American history,
not for what he did for his own race but for what he did for all oppressed people everywhere.
He is a reminder that the African-American heritage is not only African but American
and it is a heritage that begins with the beginning of America.

           Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait

March 5 is the anniversary of the death of Crispus Attucks,
the first person to die in the Boston Massacre

 

 

 

 

So often true

They were heedless of the fact
    that they’d gain more converts if they just stopped talking.

                        James Ellroy, Perfidia

 

 

 

 

 

 

The miracle of love

The Bible is full of miracles,
and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike.
But the miracle which every one is permitted to experience some time in his life,
the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will,
the miracle which is open to the fool and the coward as well as the hero and the saint, is love.
Born of an instant, it lives eternally.
If energy is imperishable, how much more so is love!
Like energy, which is still a complete enigma, love is always there, always on tap.
Man has never created an ounce of energy, nor did he create love.
Love and energy have always been, always will be.
Perhaps in essence they are one and the same. Why not?
Perhaps this mysterious energy which is identified with the life of the universe,
which is God in action, as some one has said,
perhaps this secret, all-invasive force is but the manifestation of love.

                    Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion III: Nexus

 

 

 

 

 

 

Partial evidence

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

Hilary Mantel, The Guardian

 

 

 

 

A revelation

You can lie to your wife or your boss, but you cannot lie to your typewriter.
        Sooner or later you must reveal your true self in your pages.

                         Leon Uris, Writers on Writing