You put your time where your priority is.

Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.

The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

The end-of-summer winds make people restless.

. . . she read with undifferentiated glee . . .

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

Something had been buried that was not yet dead.

Oh, the sweetness of giving in, of full surrender.

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

I don't like being rumbled, I like to be invisible.

It was entirely silent and I tried to breathe its peace.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

I have a tremendous battle with melancholy and depression.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

Our own choices might not be as good as those that are made for us.

There you are, sir. There's nothing more than to love and be loved.

But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.

The past was suddenly rushing in on me in a way I found hard to fight.

One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

He wrote one more paragraph for his own sake, to see what he had to say.

I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.

My direction? Anywhere. Because one is always nearer by not keeping still.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

It's only after the change is fully formed that you can see what's happened.

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

One thing about London is that when you step out into the night, it swallows you.

If you have only one life, you cant altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

If you have only one life, you can't altogether ignore the question: are you enjoying it?

We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.

I never for a moment considered killing myself, because it wouldn't have achieved anything.

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

I'd never chosen to be alone, but that was the way things had turned out, and I'd grown used to it.

There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

The best thing is the combined effect of nicotine with alcohol, greater than the sum of the two parts.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart.

Knowing one was comprised of recycled matter only and that selfhood was a delusion did not take away the aching of the heart.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

I suppose that each of us may have a great moment in our life, a month, a week a year, when we are most fully what we are meant to be

I believe your stomach tells you what it wants, and I don't think mine asks for anything that unhealthy. I'm a trained health machine.

The nicest characters in 'A Week in December' are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

If I could eat only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be rhubarb fool, which I make with ginger and a hint of elderflower cordial.

I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.

The nicest characters in A Week in December research are, in fact, Muslims - and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them.

The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?

Have you ever been lonely? No, neither have I. Solitary, yes. Alone, certainly. But lonely means minding about being on your own. I've never minded about it.

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