Tom Marcham

“One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.'
'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit without moving, without undertaking anything...'
'Life won't leave one alone as it is.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.”
― Geoff Dyer

“It's striking how many of the world's biggest problems, and many of the small ones too. are eliminated by the simplest of solutions – having women around.”
― Geoff Dyer, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush

“To be interested in something is to be involved in what is essentially a stressful relationship with that thing, to suffer anxiety on its behalf.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence