human nature

Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.

"Archie's got a delightful little mind," Lanfear used to say to me, rather wistfully, "but it's just a highly polished surface held up to the show as it passes. Dredge's mind takes in only a bit at a time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just

Arthur Schopenhauer in his aptly titled Studies in Pessimism: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

Each, indeed, secretly wondered what James could see in any one so showy and dashing as Sibyl. But they were too discreet to admit this, even one to the other, and contented themselves with politely wondering what Sibyl could see in such a country sobersides as James.

“I detest mysteries. I would never bring one into my home.” “Well, you have, in me.” I blushed, I think, from head to toe. “That’s different,” I stammered. “Human lives exist to be experienced, or possibly endured, but not solved. They resemble any other novel more than they do mysteries. Westerns, even. It’s that lie the mystery tells that I detes

Did she model the Alysha beneath the masks and façades that every one of us wears, or did she model the masks too, the person Alysha tried to be whenever anyone was watching? Even the cracksman who’d made her hadn’t been able to give a certain answer to that. A mixture of the two, he’d said. The person she presented to the world, the parts she want

I felt a quick gust of annoyance and I let it turn to anger, anger being infinitely preferable to guilt.

The meeting was generally felt to be a pleasant one, being composed in a good proportion of those who would talk and those who would listen;

as Wanda says in BoJackHorseman, “when you look at someone through rose-tinted glasses, all the red flags just look like flags”.