Citation: Georges Simenon: L'Étoile du Nord

Jamais il n'avait pensé avec impatience à la retraite.

(concernant le commissaire Maigret) 

Moi non plus. Je n’aime pas devoir à travailler mais j’ai peur que sans travailler je ne pourrai payer le loyer pour vivre seul dans une chambre.


(à l'origine posté sur Tumblr ou WordPress)

Oliver Burkeman: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

"For [Ernest] Becker, mental illness is a malfunctioning of the internal death-denial machinery. Depressed people are depressed because they try but repeatedly fail to shield themselves, as others manage to do, from the truth that they are not, in reality, cosmically significant heroes – and that pretty soon they’re going to die." 

(p 182)

(originally posted probably on Tumblr or maybe on WordPress)

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

(All by the narrator, Christopher John Francis Boon.)


I decided to leave him alone because when I am sad I want to be left alone.

(p 21)

It takes me a long time to get used to people I do not know.

(p 35)

I don’t like swimming because I don’t like taking my clothes off.

(p 77)

I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

(p 103)

And then I Formulated a Plan. And that made me feel better because there was something in my head that had an order and a pattern and I just had to follow the instructions one after the other.

(p 132)

And then the countryside started and there were fields and cows and horses and a bridge and a farm and more houses and lots of little roads with cars on. And that made me think that there must be millions of miles of train track in the world and they all go past houses and roads and rivers and fields, and that made me think how many people must be in the world and they all have houses and roads to travel on and cars and pets and clothes and all eat lunch and go to bed and have names and this made my head hurt, too.

(p 161)

These are just the best ones, there very many more which made me think “yes, that’s precise”!



(originally posted on Tumblr or WordPress)

Back to basics?

I’ve finally run out of patience with my new HP that I'd no doubt abused here earlier, and bought an Asus - a trademark I'd been satisfied with before. So it’s 'back to Asus', strictly speaking - but in a sense back to basics too: I'm not transferring my files wholesale as usual, only moving those I really want to keep and deleting the junk I've accumulated over the years.

As for the new machine, the first impression was disappointment, because unlike the picture it didn't come with a numeric keypad, but the speed is what I was used to before the HP, and that's what matters.

 (originally posted probably on Tumblr)