Lu

“Well, no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I'm not married to.”
― Douglas Adams

“Withdrawal into the self is passive in relation to an overcomplex social reality which oscillates between innuendo and brutal explicitness, but it appears to be a solution of sorts. It is as difficult to assess as it is to understand. It cannot be said that ‘reprivatization’ has not been actively chosen. There has been an option, and a general one (social options, group choices, socially accepted and adopted proposals for choice). Nor can it be said that it has been chosen freely. However, the choice itself is imposed and the solution is indicated or countermanded. This constraint operates within a fairly narrow margin of freedom; the weight from outside and from the ‘world’ becomes increasingly oppressive for an intimacy which has been metamorphosed into a mass phenomenon.
Is this a lifestyle, or is it life unequivocally stripped of all style? Although we would tend towards the second of these hypotheses, it is still too early to reach a decision; scrutiny of these hypotheses and this problem is part of the sociology of boredom …”
― Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday

“I recall the day my sister and I turned five and were allowed an extra hour ’twixt bath and bed. Mrs. Twigg would set her hourglass running there in the nursery; we could do whate’er we wished with the time, but when the sand had run ’twas off to bed and no lingering. I’faith, what a treasure that hour seemed: time for any of a hundred pleasures! We fetched out the cards, to play some game or other—but what silly game was worth such a wondrous hour? I vowed I’d build a castle out of blocks, and Anna set to drawing three soldiers upon a paper—but neither of us could pursue his sport for long, for thinking the other had chosen more wisely, so that anon we made exchange and were no more pleased. We cast about more desperately among our toys and games—whereof any one had sufficed for an hour’s diversion earlier in the day—but none would do, and still the glass ran on! Any hour save this most prime and measured we had been pleased enough to do no more than talk, or watch the world at work outside our nursery window, but when I cried ‘Heavy, heavy hangs over thy head,’ to commence a guessing game, Anna fell straightway to weeping, and I soon joined her. Yet e’en our tears did naught to ease our desperation; indeed, they but heightened it the more, for all the while we wept, our hour was slipping by. Now bedtime, mind, we’d ne’er before looked on as evil, but that sand was like our lifeblood draining from some wound; we sat and wept, and watched it flow, and the upshot of’t was, we both fell ill and took to heaving, and Mrs. Twigg fetched us off to bed with our last quarter hour still in the glass.”
― John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

“Some have contended that it was America’s love of pie-throwing that led the nation to develop the atomic bomb. This may or may not be true, but certainly it does help explain the country’s current panic over the possible proliferation of the bombs to unfriendly nations: it’s a cardinal rule of the act that one custard pie leads to another, and he who throws one must sooner or later face one coming from the other direction.”
― Robert Coover