..better to want something you don't have, than to have something you don't want..

Every single cell in the human body replaces itself over a period of seven years. That means there's not even the smallest part of you now that was part of you seven years ago.
Everything is changing.
In the early days of my second life I noticed how the shadow of the telegraph pole would inch between the gardens of two houses across the street - from 152 to the garden of 150 - over the course of several hours, from lunchtime into evening.
After watching this a few times I did the maths: the shadow movement from one garden to the next meant that both houses, the telegraph pole, the street, all of us, had travelled one thousand, one hundred and sixty miles around the earth with the turning of the planet. We'd also travelled about seventy-six thousand miles through space around the sun in the same period and much further as part of the wider spiralling of the galaxy. And nobody noticed a thing. There is no stillness, only change. Yesterdays here is not todays here. Yesterdays here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It's behind the sun, it's in deep space, hundreds of thousands of miles, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Everyone of us standing on this planet, we're all moving forwards and we're never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It's the thought of friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we've been forced to abandon.

The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall




..I slung the backpack over my shoulder and was bound to go and say goodbye and put him out of his misery when Rachael and Leo appeared on either side of me.
I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand. They drew me away with them towards the little muddy beach where we stood and faced the slow brown expanse of water.

Enduring Love
Ian McEwan




...I remember having an almost hallucinatory certainty that 'one must do good'. The primacy of doing good starts to unravel in the everyday world where what is 'good' is not so obvious. Nor is it obvious always how to effect a desired 'good' result. The burning desire to do good, whilst useful as a sign of commitment to something outside oneself, is not enough. Lying there reading with my chin propped on my chest I knew the 'do good' feeling was not enough. I needed knowledge first. I needed to know how to tell what was good and what was bad.
I fondly imagined when I started looking for a better, wiser, saner way to live that all 'problems', such as insecurity, lack of confidence, pessimism, would all melt away as I progressively got more and more knowledge. I didn't really understand that this annoying undergrowth of psychological problems had to be dealt with first. There is a saying that one must first be an egoist in order to then become just. You must do your own thing before you can do things for other people.


Being a Man
Robert Twigger