human nature

It was something that Parsifal figured out when he was halfway through his career as a magician: People don’t pay attention. They don’t know how. They can smell guilt or fear from the other side of the Dodgers’ stadium, but if you simply go about your business with authority no one can tell.

Russell T. Davies’s observation that good dialogue is ‘two monologues clashing. It’s true in life, never mind drama. Everyone is always, always thinking about themselves.’

Those old women know just how to sit on the mountain-top and watch the tigers fight; how to murder with a borrowed knife, or help the wind to fan the fire. They will look on safely from the bank while you are drowning in the river.

Arendt saw that in her time, too. “Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

he would really have given up any thing, which he had not been very much tempted to do.

Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought;

like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

The evolution of our strange, extremely other-obsessed brains has brought with it weird side-effects. Human obsession with faces is so fierce we see them almost anywhere: in fire; in clouds; down spooky corridors; in toast. We sense minds everywhere too. Just as the brain models the outside world it also builds models of minds. This skill, which is

She remembered her dancing days in Somerset, Hunt Balls, and County Balls in the draughty Assembly Rooms. With the best intentions she had never managed to enjoy them. The first hour was well enough, but after that came increasing listlessness and boredom; the effort, when one danced again with the same partner, not to say the same things, combined

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