The Purdzilla Show

Photo by Chandler Cruttenden on Unsplash Whatever thought you think there's always a million people thinking it at the same moment. But that was how I felt. We're all on the burning deck and nobody knows it except me. I looked at the dumb-bell faces streaming past. Like turkeys in November, I thought. Not a notion of what's coming to them. It was as if I'd got X-rays in my eyes and could see the skeletons walking. George Orwell (in Coming Up For Air )

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past. George Orwell (in Coming Up For Air )

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash Is someone afraid of change? Well, what can ever come to be without change? Can you yourself take your bath, if the wood that heats it is not changed? Can you be fed, unless what you eat changes? Can any other of the benefits of life be achieved without change? Do you not see then that for you to be changed is equal, and equally necessary to the nature of the Whole? Marcus Aurelius 

There was tea and coffee in one of the cupboards and I poked my head back round and Elizabeth and Poppy stopped their conversation, and I asked Poppy if she wanted milk and sugar and she said could she have a cardamom and lychee infusion and I nodded as if this was quite normal, which I understand it is these days, and ducked back into the kitchen. Goodness me, that was a long sentence to write. In a book they would tell me to put a full stop in there somewhere. After 'infusion'? Richard Osman (an extract from Joyce's diary in The Man Who Died Twice )

I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room. May Sarton (Poet)

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash Elizabeth walks out into the cold evening air, not turning back now. The skies are getting darker earlier and the scarves are coming out of the wardrobes. Summer is still keeping a lid on autumn, but it won't be long. How many more autumns for Elizabeth? How many more years of slipping on a pair of comfortable boots and walking through the leaves? One day, spring will come without her. The daffodils will always keep coming up by the lake, but you won't always be there to see them. So it goes; enjoy them while you can. Richard Osman (in The Thursday Murder Club )