"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Of kings and Kims

EXTRACT: The only real difference between the British and North Korean monarchies is that Pyongyang is new to the game of absurd ritual and dynastic pomp - the Koreans are just parvenus. Johnny-come-latelies. Just look at the Kims, for whom the height of Stalinist bling is a Rolex watch or Ray-Ban sunglasses. How tawdry when compared to the real thing. By contrast, our dear queen does it properly, draping herself from head to toe in an ostentatious display of gold and diamonds. And in this time of austerity we are supposed to be all in this together - tell that to the homeless and unemployed.
No, I’m afraid the idea that Britain is distinctively normal, sensible and rational in comparison to North Korea just doesn’t cut it - the constitutional monarchy is weird.
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Posted by at 1:57 pm

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