Mike Beaven

“If we didn't have the storms, we'd never get to play in the waves.”
― Judy Prescott Marshall, Still Crazy

“the psychological need to believe that others take you as seriously as you take yourself. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, as psychological needs go, but yet of course we should always remember that a deep need for anything from other people makes us easy pickings.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“only thing you need to worry about is which block they put you on. As you’re a first-timer you’ll probably end up on A block, where life is a lot easier. The old-timers, like me, are usually sent to D block, where there’s no one under thirty and no one with a record for violence, so it’s the ideal set-up”
― Jeffrey Archer, The Sins of the Father