Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing.

Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply...

And when someone else speaks your name you feel pleased. You feel wanted. You feel there. Alive. Even if they’re saying your name with dislike, at least you know you’re you, that you exist.

Love, being in love, isn’t a constant thing. It doesn’t always flow at the same strength. It’s not always like a river in flood. It’s more like the sea. It has tides, it ebbs and...

I cannot live without reading.

He thought: How difficult it is to explain yourself to yourself. Sometimes there only is, and no knowing.

Sometimes the course of our lives depends on what we do or don’t do in a few seconds, a heartbeat, when we either seize the opportunity, or just miss it. Miss the moment and you...

I don’t just want to ban The Bomb. I want to ban all bombs, whatever, and all bombers, whoever, and all bombings, whyever. There have to be better ways of saying no and making changes.

It’s one of the great temptations, you see–wanting to prove the strength of your own faith by making others believe what you believe. It shows you’re right. But it doesn’t prove anything of the sort....

I’ve always been a slow learner in some areas of my life.mostly the areas known as myself. Or maybe I should say ‘selves.’because the fact is, I’ve never, even as a child, felt I’m only...

The plain unwelcome fact is that sometimes life stymies you.

Is it better to go with the flow or let the flow go?

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always...

Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d’you think?

Secrets. Funny how, when you’re about to be given something precious, something you’ve wanted for a long time, you suddenly feel nervous over taking it.Everyone wants more than anything to be allowed into someone else’s...

If we try to measure Now, we find it’s always gone, has become part of the past.

Things it helps me to rememberWhen in a bad mood, keep quiet or still.Baggy jumpers don’t suit you.When you’re tired you get doubtful.Difficulties come in spurts.Listen to the echo of your own voice. Avoid be...

Ah, clever clogs, but it will have happened in one of my alternative lives. You know–the lives hot-shot scientists tell us we are living at the same time as this one we know about. Which...

And trust dies from ifs and buts

a joy that hurts with sadnessa sadness that is pleasurablea pleasure full of terrora terror that excitesan excitement that calmsa calmness that frightens.

She was–I keep using the past tense; I ought to say she is–one of those people who, at first sight, look plain, are quiet, unassertive, unmemorable even. But who, when they start to talk and...

It is not growing like a treeIn bulk, doth make Man better be;Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:A lily of a dayIs fairer far...

true love” is such a good term because love can only be true. If it isn’t true it can’t be love.

I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If...