permutations

Some people spend so much of their time trying to please other people they forget to please themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to be other people they forget to be themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to please other people they forget to be themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to be someone else they forget who they are.

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drunken jotting

My foolishness is a part of me I would never repudiate.

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It makes me human.

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betrayal

Betrayal is both an absolute and a relative art form.

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It can take many forms. Some less obvious than others. Sometimes the most obvious betrayals are the most minimal. And the worst betrayals are never even noticed.

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For betrayal does not take place in the outside world. In the boardrooms, bedrooms or corridors of power.

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Betrayal always takes place in the heart.

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cruel to be kind

People carry round a fictional notion of their selves which becomes more real than their 'real' self.

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They seek to protect their fictional self with more vigour than their 'real' self.

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The cruellest thing anyone can do to these people is shatter this notion of a fictional self.

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For a 'real' self can never be shattered.

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a line discovered written in pencil on the inside flysheet of alan pauls' the past

Love is like a lens
Which filters out all
Those things the lover
Does not wish to see.

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bucket and spade

Almost inevitably those who feel themselves to have the least control over their lives are liable to be the biggest control freaks.

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on reading

Reading is a process of curiosity. One turns the pages in order to have something revealed that wasn't known before opening them. Whether that be the end of the plot or the shape of the universe.

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Every time we open a book we do so in the hope that we shall meet someone with something to say, something we have never heard before.

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west london tales 6

Wild parrots at play in Hyde Park. Screeching and diving like they've lived there for generations. Except that, on an admittedly grey day, in contrast to the parrots of the tropics, singeing the sky with a vivid dart, these creatures have no colour at all. They've flown straight out of a black and white movie.

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the lover's discourse

There is nothing as attractive as someone else finding you attractive.

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People think seduction is about dazzling. Fortunately for some and less so for others it ususally has more to do with listening.

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Tickle someone's vanity and you can steal their soul.

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'the past is another country'

The man was right.

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But... the past is still somewhere whose streets are walked in the mind, whose hills are climbed, whose water is drunk. In the mind.

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The past may be another country; but it can never become a foreign land.

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the un-randomness of it all

Barring acts of god; (unless one is of a religious disposition):

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Events have a way of happening to us as a result of our susceptibility to those events.

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Even though they might seem like the most unlikely of occurrences.

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