Him

You know you're going to have fun with a new book when you find a Beautifully Put on the first page (ok, after the prologue, but you get the idea). Here are two of my favourite authors talking about Him upstairs...

"God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say circuitous, ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players*, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules and who smiles all the time."

*ie., everybody 


Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

On surviving hardship

“He had returned from his years on the Russian front with one important souvenir: the inability to get worked up about things that weren't three years on the Russian front.” 

Tibor Fischer, Under The Frog.

The curse of the working classes

By midnight he had drunk himself into a stupor and was wondering why he had not done so earlier. He felt very relaxed and kept forgetting who he was. Which was good.

He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, staggered back to the bedroom and collapsed on to the eiderdown. His brain felt emptier than it had done at any other time in the past few months. The thought occurred to him that he could become an alcoholic. And at this precise moment it seemed a not unreasonable solution to his problems.

Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother

Life, or something like it

Existence was not only absurd, it was plain hard work. Think of how many times you put on your underwear in a lifetime. It was appalling, it was disgusting, it was stupid.

Charles Bukowski: Pulp: A Novel

The essence of banking

Montagu Norman, head of the Bank of England and considered to be one of the most powerful bankers in the world, summing up in 1948 his career and the work of his colleagues over his lifetime...


"As I look back, it now seems that, with all the thought and work and good intentions, which we provided, we achieved absolutely nothing."

Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression, and the Bankers who Broke the World

On Italian Drivers

"Driving in Italy made me nervous. People steered cars as if they were horses. They didn't think in terms of roads, but in terms of where they wanted to go: a road was where someone else wanted you to go, a road was an insult. I admired this attitude, as long as I wasn't driving."

Margaret Atwood,  Lady Oracle