Mel

“The young will always to some extent view ageing as a matter of taste, as if the fact you do not appear to be young any more is a decision you’ve made, like selecting a certain type of carpet or paint for your house.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“How nice, then, to go to Waterstones and not to have to disinfect yourself when you get home; yet sometimes as a reader I feel nostalgic for disorder, for the random and unpredictable. I find myself wanting to be free from categorization, or to introduce another kind; I wish bookshops had a shelf called Really Interesting Books. We all know what a RIB is, I think. It's a book that is about more than you imagined when first you picked it up. RIBs are like treasure maps—the marks on the paper are only symbolic indications of the riches to be recovered. They tell you things you always somehow knew, but had never been able to articulate. A RIB is like going on your travels, but also somehow like arriving home.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing

“People don't just happen. We sacrifice former versions of ourselves. We sacrifice the people who dared to raise us. The “I” it seems doesn't exist until we are able to say,"I am no longer yours.”
― Saeed Jones, How We Fight For Our Lives

“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought. The most moving moments of our lives find us without words. What can be explained with words is only the waves, the foam on the surface, but music has its place underneath the waves, in the silent depth of the unspeakable”
― Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld: An Unauthorized Autobiography – A Disarming Memoir in the Tradition of Byron and Wilde