"The modern strawberry is a tale of disappointment and delight. I have learned to treat each punnet of really good berries I encounter as a box of fleeting, precious jewels, a treat to be enjoyed with unalloyed pleasure; no cream, sugar or splash of Beaujolais, just the warm berry in all its scarlet glory. That perfect fruit is a rare find, but once you chance upon it life seems, for an instant, to stand still. Eyes closed, you are briefly lost in buttercup meadows, with bees buzzing on the heavy afternoon air. You need to make much of a truly excellent strawberry when you find it…. Once a year I find myself falling for a cardboard punnet of misshapen, organic fruits the loud scarlet-red of a Ferrari. It is then, breathing in their honey-sweet scent, the prickle of their yellow seeds on my lips, that I wish they could always be like this."  - Nigel Slater, Tender Volume 2 (via disappointment and delight)

"You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you’re reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch – and then briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above – a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes."  - Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs. (via somethingchanged)

"I spend money on Martinis and expensive dinners because, as is typical among my species of debtor, I tell myself that Martinis and expensive dinners are the entire point — the point of being young, the point of living in New York City, the point of living."  -

My Misspent Youth, by Meghan Daum

"Today, however, we are in a position to derive much of our happiness from pursuits internal to our minds. We do this by blogging, watching House of Cards on Netflix, listening to a symphony from iTunes, tweeting with friends and acquaintances, seeing their pictures on Facebook or Path, and learning and collaborating on Wikipedia. As a result, once one secures a certain income to cover basic needs, greater happiness and well-being today can be had for virtually nothing. What is the point, then, of doing materially better than one’s parents?"  -

Not Doing Better Than Our Parents and Loving It (Or, Why Keynes Was Right)

"What Cameron can do, however, if he feels real contrition for Britain’s past, is to make the teaching of the British empire a compulsory part of the GCSE history syllabus. The empire was, for better or worse, the most important thing the British ever did: it completely changed the shape of the modern world. Yet most British people are by and large completely unaware of the details of their imperial history. My own children learned Tudors and the Nazis over and again in history class, but never came across a whiff of Indian history. This means that they, like most people who go through the British education system, are wholly ill-equipped to judge either the good or the bad in what we did to the rest of the world."  - Apologising for Amritsar is pointless. Better redress is to never forget.

”If you’re in love with something, it’s comparatively easy, but if you’re not, then life is more difficult, isn’t it?” - Vivien Leigh

"

I suppose it’s a cliché to say you’re glad to be alive, that life is short, but to say you’re glad to be not dead requires a specific intimacy with loss that comes only with age or deep experience. One has to know not simply what dying is like, but to know death itself, in all its absoluteness.

After all, there are many ways to die — peacefully, violently, suddenly, slowly, happily, unhappily, too soon. But to be dead — one either is or isn’t.

The same cannot be said of aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause — to memorize moments of the everyday.

"  - On Being Not Dead, by Bill Hayes

"We talk to ourselves when we travel. We get used to the double-voiced loneliness that accompanies us somewhere strange and, because we have already imagined it, familiar. We tell ourselves stories about places, and our stories are stories about us. We knead our dreams and our memories into the clay of new streets and new cities, and because they are a part of us we are never alone."  - Tara Isabella Burton: Fatherlands - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics (via guernicamag)

"How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on ‘Top of the Pops’ singing ‘Life on Mars.’"  - Ali Smith, Artful (via thepenguinpress)

"The older I get and the more I work as an actor, the more I appreciate a very naked performance. It’s hard to strip yourself down and trust that level of simplicty, just trust your own humanity as an actor. You wanna tart it up with drama or intensity or gesture or a lot of color. Sometimes you realize the hardest thing to do is just trust your own humanity and let it come through without twists or inflections or anything. And I don’t think I’m there yet."  - Edward Norton (via sendinthebasterds)