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Disgusting

“When we gamble, we’re asking the universe what we’re worth, and the universe, terrifyingly, tells us.”

‘Lonely mouth,’ he repeated.
‘It’s a Japanese expression. It means, like, you feel like you want to eat something, but you don’t know what it is. You’re looking for just the right thing. But maybe there is no right thing. Maybe you don’t need anything at all. But you can’t tell.’

‘Where do you get your drive?’
‘Cigarettes and self-doubt,’ he replied.

“I had absorbed the basic truth that everything you needed to know had, at some point, already been written down by someone.”

Anhedonia… the problem with happiness that's in its rarity it proves intensely terrifying, and anxiety inducing to accept..

It is no wonder that the concept of a God who can see us has been central to many religions: to be seen is to be assured that we exist, all the better if one is dealing with a God (or partner) who loves us.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until ..

What is an experience? Something that breaks a polite routine and for a brief period allows us to witness things with the heightened sensitivity afforded to us by novelty, danger, or beauty - and it's on the basis of shared experiences that intimacy is given an opportunity to grow.

The danger with the kind of beauty that does not look like a Greek statue is that its precariousness places much emphasis on the viewer. Once the imagination decides to remove itself from the gap in the teeth, is it not time for a good orthodontist?

“Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.”

“We charm by coincidence rather than design”

“We create for the same reason we do anything; fear of the alternative”

Deep cleaning gives life meaning. Just grab a duster, Buster.

“The truth is, Pip, I have lost all my mirth, if indeed I ever had any.”

All I can say is that when I saw the city below, all I could do was mutter to myself the only words that could approach the feeling coursing through me, and the words were: “Oh, shit.”

..They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it.”

People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they're going to do…

'That's all very well, Jim. The trouble with love is it gets you in such a state you can't look at your own feelings dispassionately.'

“enfant terrible” such a nice description

“Not even your own death is exciting enough any more, unless it gets on the telly. Everyone wants to have a bit of drama in their lives, everyone wants a share in melodrama. Everybody wants their own experiences reflected back at them, enlarged, airbrushed, properly lit. Nobody wants to be ordinary any more.’

The 2008 global financial crisis has revealed that much of the recent productivity growth in finance had been achieved through the debasement of the products – that is, the creation of overly complex, riskier and even fraudulent products.

The 2008 global financial crisis has revealed that much of the recent productivity growth in finance had been achieved through the debasement of the products – that is, the creation of overly complex, riskier and even fraudulent products.

Not everything that counts can be measured, not everything that can be measured counts: can – and should – happiness be measured?

what is the capitalist economy, or capitalism? It is an economy in which production is organized in pursuit of profit, rather than for own consumption (as in subsistence farming, where you grow your own food) or for political obligations (as in feudal societies or in socialist economies, where political authorities, respectively aristocrats and the central planning authority, tell you what to produce).

The Greeks called emotions pathē, meaning "experi-ence" or "suffering." Whether it was one or the other depended on which pathe you were experiencing (or suffering).

“I Hope You Die In Your Sleep”

Deep in the meadow, under the willow
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes
And when again they open, the sun will rise.

Deep in the meadow, under the willow
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes
And when again they open, the sun will rise.

“nostalgia for a time before you were born”: a phenomenon he had increasingly observed among young people, whose longing for an idealized, anxiety-free and smartphone-less 1990s, for instance, has begun to manifest itself in obsessive watching of the American sitcom Friends. ”