The Impotent Fury of the Privileged

"The world is a saddening mess, of unfathomable complexity and the simplest cruelty. And yet, rather than raging or weeping, most of us still manage to eat snacks, do crosswords and occasionally wash. But what if, what if we heave our compassion from wherever it's buried and with courage enough to seem naïve or underinformed or oblivious to futility, we reach for something better? Something more engaged, more humane and less snack-based."

www.danielkitson.com

Turnaround

"It was easy to be irritated about everything that was of no consequence, yet care about nothing that mattered"

Richard Flanagan, 'The Unknown Terrorist'

Dry humour

"She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them to form a political party - with a chance of government perhaps - but what would such a party do if it was in power? Nothing, she imagined. It would try to pass legislation, but would fail."

From The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Sunlit dust

"If you're fortunate, the thread of meaning that is said to run through personal existence eventually breaks and the coherent story of a life that might have looked good in a book or newspaper obituary becomes instead the floating of glowing dust particles in a beautiful shaft of sunlight called consciousness.

I'm beginning to think that a good life has a very pleasing lack of story line and a lot of sunlit dust particles"

Michael Leunig

"How many store loyalty cards can you possess before you are actually, ironically, guilty of disloyalty?"
Rohan Candappa, "Rules Britannia"

Lyrical romantic

"Let's just drive until we've found somewhere there's more headstones in the cemetery than houses in the town, and never leave"

Marty Donald, The Lucksmiths

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

Published in 2003, this book received very positive reviews from many sources, as well as the Whitbread Book of the Year (which disturbingly is now the Costa Book Award, as in the British coffee chain). It is principally an interior monologue of a 15-year-old boy with Aspergers Syndrome, Christopher Boone. The power of the book is in the factual way Christopher relates all of his story: from his genius level understanding of mathematics, his determination to solve the 'curious incident' of the title, and most strikingly the disintegration of his parents' relationship.

Conventionally society regards people with a mental disability as hindered in pursuing an ephemerally 'normal' life. Here however, entirely without preaching or didactic effort to educate, the people who aren't succeeding are the able-minded and able-bodied adults that Christopher encounters. In their version of the world everything is confused by emotions and expectations. In Christopher's as long as the different foods on his plate don't touch and he can avoid brown and yellow then life can progress quite adequately.

There are several provoking observations, which form the substance of the novel, rather than an intriguing story. I was most taken with the following digression on the notion of time:

"Because time is not like space. And when you put something down somewhere...you can have a map in your head to tell you where you have left it...And a timetable is a map of time, except that if you don't have a timetable time is not there...Because time is only the relationship between the way different thing change...and it isn't a fixed relationship."

Positive growth

"They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure."

Ernest Hemingway

Good point

"If a man is left alone in a room with a tea cosy, and he does not attempt to wear it, he should not be trusted" Billy Connolly

Issues

"Well I'm sorry Miss Poster Girl for the Workers' Party, but until I get that, uh, toehold in the burger industry? I gotta little time to suck. I'd rather check into a shelter than deal with her shit."
Troy (Ethan Hawke) in Reality Bites.

Freedom

"For, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any condition be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself"

This is from the Declaration of Arbroath, which asserted Scottish independence, and is penned from Robert the Bruce, hero of Scotland

And why wouldn't you fight to save a land like this?