EPITAPHS

Love-making is a game you win by losing. Yes! Yes! Yes!


Only the insecure describe themselves as serious.


Doing things properly is the grubby utilitarianism of middle management.


Technology perpetuates.


Style is all-inclusive. Like a cheapo package holiday.


The chameleon who can’t change his skin is unfulfilled.


Most of our brain is idiotic. Therefore, we can be mostly swayed by idiotic arguments.


The tragedy of western Liberalism is that humanbeings will always turn a meritocracy into a mediocracy.


What thought is not shadowed by a question?


Wrecks are indestructible.


A bag of gold means nothing until we exchange it for a man’s life. God exists in the way money exists. This facet of ourselves means nothing until we use it as persuasion to kill another who does not share it.


One sad fact of life is being in love with somebody who does not love you is not love, but obsession.


‘See’, she said, pointing to water.


‘I love you.’ Much tarnished by vicious use; retains lucent power.


What is philosophy? Asking that question.


For love poetry must the poet love?


‘Speech is beautifully useless’?
So Laird is gorgeously boring.
(Usefully beautiful, that.)


‘feelings, npl. These cannot be willed away. You can change what you believe, what you say about them; you cannot change them.’


There’s no man’s talent matches his.


Poets are phrasemakers — with contracts to publish.


There isn't a verb for the way literature teaches.


Franzen’s prose compels annotation; I was too anxious I’d forget his rapid felicities; I wanted as response to interact with — by recording and marking out — prose this constantly delightful, since to annotate is to socialise with the book.


Poem — not what it says; what the language is.


Think of life as dark landing. Faith is what prevails against the part of minds that would imagine, in the dark, surrounding men or ghosts there.


Q: Who is it the popular are popular with?
A: Those they don’t know, but who want to know them.


In literature, true mastery is to forget one is master.


In the flowergarden that Spring Jenny likened sinning to a rose.

‘They are beautiful, but have thorns,’ she said.

Vitality lasts.

Every day we look upon that which we were the day before with patronage and disbelief. And as for our youth ... But what, did it perceive, of the bicentenarian gaze? What of our seventy years’ accomplishment then?

Meiosis is pointing and saying.

Winters had a blindspot the size of his head.

Only experience will rid you of fear; only fearlessness win experience.

The moral of the story of Hirst is the difficulty of telling between art whose badness mocks its buyers and art whose badness makes a mockery of them.

by among others Paul Abbott