Inspirational Quotes 66

You can't see me

Just be yourself, don't think about what others are thinking about you, people will take you at your own valuation, you'll be stronger on your own, pigs might fly... Has anyone blogged "how I lived on cliché'd advice for a year?

In my social life... I became more extrovert as a performer... Eventually... I couldn’t remember how to “do” my personality any more. (Girl who went deaf in her 20s.)

There is a certain advantage for a woman novelist in being middle-aged and overweight. You acquire a curious social invisibility: strangers sometimes carry on in front of you as if you weren't there; or if they chance to fall into conversation, they talk, on occasion, with a surprising lack of inhibition. (Jane Stevenson, Guardian 2006)

Considering his particular interest in how primates manipulate their own and others’ reputations to their own advantage... (Nicholas Humphrey on Robin Dunbar)

Approach an elk upwind and it will spook. Run your hand against the grain of the wood and you'll get a splinter. (John Eldredge Live the dream! As long as it doesn’t involve elks and planks.)

Everything is awesome, everything is cool when you're part of a team. (Mr The Boy ‏@knitboy)

Conferences can be challenging without a sidekick... (CP)


It was a constructivist approach that… “moved teaching away from the traditional/academic approaches of memorization, repetitions and activity books, to a much more comprehensive approach focused on learning in a contextual setting in which children are expected to find the answers for themselves.” And it didn’t work. (Re maths teaching in Canada. Web of Substance)

Parents on programme Child Genius “never seem to have asked themselves where it is all going to end". (Hugo Rifkind, Times July 2014)


For a lot of people, the 70s were a rebellion against authority. In my family’s case, authority figures were parents, too... We would hold ‘meetings’ if there were issues to be discussed. (Her stepfather suggested they all pooled their money and took out what they needed.) I was 9 and my brother was 7. It was completely insane. (Sophie Grabol)

Everyone deserves to have a nice job and have a nice family when they're older. (Boy interviewed on BBC News)

Everybody thinks they belong in the group ten years below them in age. (Katharine Whitehorn, paraphrase)


Can we not with this mindset that being accused of an -ism/oppressive behaviour is worse than actually (constantly) facing it? Can we NOT? (@FeministAspie)

Also, remember, folks, labelling offensive tweets "parody" makes them funny & acceptable. (Rose ‏@SwissMinx)


The world of dating has certainly changed since I was ‘out there’ over 14 years ago. Back then, you met people either through work, friends or going out to the pub. It was almost impossible to meet anyone any other way... (Says a dating service website. What about “take up an interest”? Does it really not work?)

As a brilliant student of Latin and Greek, the 18-year old Gissing seemed destined for an academic career until, in May 1876, his life changed dramatically and for ever. He was caught stealing money from the cloakroom of Owens College, Manchester, convicted and sentenced to a month in prison. The money (five shillings and twopence) was intended to help out an alcoholic prostitute, Nell Harrison, whom he later married in the hope of redeeming her. It proved a terrible miscalculation, and, after repeated salvage attempts on his part and much abusive behaviour on hers, he left her for good. The next time he saw Nell, in March 1888, she was lying dead from syphilis in a Lambeth boarding house.

10 Things True Friends Don’t DoGossip behind your back.
Make personal attacks.
Start pointless arguments.
Interrupt your every word.
Discourage you from pursuing your goals.
Look down on you for your past.
Abandon you in social situations. (“True friends are emotionally intelligent enough to know that bringing a friend to a party where they don’t know anyone, and then proceeding to throw them to the fishes, is a very inconsiderate thing to do.”)
Get jealous of your success.
Judge you or try to “fix” you.
Take your friendship for granted.
(lifehack.org, paraphrase)

More here, and links to the rest.

Agatha Christie's The Hollow (1946)

A group of people collects at a house in the country for a family weekend. One of them never goes home again... The book is longer than usual, and the characters have more depth (at least, we find out more about them, and see things from their point of view). As someone else has pointed out, the book begins with a series of interior monologues – unusual for Christie, unless she was using one of the characters as a narrator, as in Murder in Mesopotamia.

The hosts are Lady Angkatell (Lucy) and her husband, ex-diplomat Sir Henry. (The Hollow is their house, a large country place with a staff and a swimming pool.) Lucy is a fragile, charming, beautiful woman with an endearing “scatty act”.

We see two of the guests preparing for the weekend, Dr John Christow and his wife Gerda. John is a successful “society” doctor who hates the hypochondriacal rich, and would rather be working on a cure for “Ridgeway’s Disease”. His wife Gerda is shy, inefficient and rather dim but adores John and thinks he is doing noble work. They have two children, a little girl and a boy who is more interested in chemical experiments and explosions than people. Gerda is dreading the weekend: the Angkatells are so clever and brittle, and insist on playing paper games that she never gets the hang of. John is irritated by her, and looks forward to meeting his mistress, sculptress Henrietta Savernake, who will also be at The Hollow. But he is haunted by memories of the South of France and an early girlfriend called Veronica who left him to star in Hollywood.

Henrietta is an Independent Young Woman Living Her Own Life, and creating what sound like rather sentimental sculptures in a pseudo-modernist style. She’s enabled to do this by family money.

Her cousin, Midge, lacks independent means and works in a dress shop. Another cousin, Edward, now lives in the family country house, Ainswick, which they all go on about. They spent holidays there as children, and Lucy grew up there – only to be ousted on her parents’ deaths, as a woman could not inherit. Edward is a scholarly fellow, madly in love with Henrietta, who is madly in love with John Christow. Meanwhile Midge is in love with Edward.

They all converge on the Hollow, where Henrietta cheers up Gerda by walking her round the kitchen garden and asking her about her knitting. Gerda has moved on to leathercraft and has made her own handbag, which Henrietta praises.

Also staying is another cousin called David, an awkward young man whom Lucy unnerves by asking him to tell her about all the fashionable ideas. Henrietta comes to the rescue again and gets him talking about the new socialist utopia that will be built on the ruins left by the war. If Edward doesn’t marry and have children, David will inherit Ainswick, and Lucy fears for its future as a people’s palace of culture.

At some point during the afternoon they all go target shooting for fun, like you do. Sir Henry has a collection of firearms, and it turns out that Lucy is a crack shot and Gerda can barely hit the target.

That night after dinner, Veronica makes an entrance through the French windows, pretending she has run out of matches. She manages to persuade John to walk her back to the cottage she has rented nearby (as part of a scheme to meet him again). Little does she know that her next-door neighbour is Hercule Poirot, who has been persuaded to try country living...

...and has been invited to lunch on Sunday. He takes a path that leads to the Hollow’s swimming pool, and then to the house. When he reaches the pool, the entire cast emerges from other paths to find a man lying dead beside the water, and a woman standing over him holding a gun. For a moment Poirot thinks they have set up a “murder hunt” as a joke, but no – John Christow is dying from a gunshot wound, and the woman standing over him is Gerda, his wife. But then it turns out that she couldn’t have shot him... so what did happen? As usual, almost anybody could have done it, and nearly everybody has a motive. Has Henrietta's love turned to hate? Has Lucy's complicated mind worked out that if John's out of the way, Henrietta can marry Edward and have children and save Ainswick from being turned into an "institute"? Has Edward shot his love rival? Did John and Veronica quarrel?

Apparently Christie thought she had spoilt the story by introducing Hercule Poirot, but I disagree. His cottage is not half-timbered but cuboid, and full of geometric ornaments for him to straighten. Various members of the cast drop in, ostensibly to ask his advice – or are they just putting up a smokescreen?

It’s a satisfying book, with some funny moments, as when Lucy tries to decide on an appropriate post-murder dinner menu. What makes it particularly 1946? Large houses with staff and a butler (called Gudgeon) had become rare, and the characters comment on this. They are all rather appalled that Midge insists on working instead of living off Lucy and Henry. Edward visits her in her shop, and is even more shocked to find that she is treated disrespectfully by the “Whitechapel” proprietress, and has to take the same treatment from the shop’s rather vulgar clientele.

Social reformers usually get rather brisk treatment in Christie’s books, and in 1946 they were seizing opportunities. Servants were a dying breed – Gudgeon is a survival. More middle-class women had jobs, and had spent the war driving trucks, making aeroplane parts, nursing and working on the land. (Christie herself went back to her old job as a pharmacist.) The characters don’t seem too much bothered by shortages (in an early scene the Christows are sitting down to roast mutton, unobtainable during the war – and surely just after it?). I wonder when Christie planned and wrote this story?

A Murder Is Announced, published in 1950, has a far more post-war feel, with posh characters clearing their own gutters, caring for their own hens and swapping home-made jam for eggs and vegetables. The only servant is an Austrian intellectual called Mitzi.

Readers and critics seem to agree that The Hollow is a better, and more “modern” book than Christie’s usual, because it has psychological depth – meaning that we inhabit the characters, and they go on about their feelings. Is this what readers want from a book these days? I like The Hollow, and I also like her more “superficial” books – which do not lack insights into character.

More on Christie here.