Inspirational Quotes 76

Wilhelm Reich

We create our own reality, we're in control of our destiny, we're ruled by our subconscious, confidence comes from within, yeah, yeah.  Live in the moment, be yourself, you’ll be stronger on your own, yawn.
Wilhelm Reich – shaped by his personal experience of war and poverty – believed that suffering was caused by external, socioeconomic factors. (Psychologist, Dec 2014)

Henry Stapp of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California is one of the few physicists that still subscribe to this notion: we are ‘participating observers’ whose minds cause the collapse of superpositions... There are many objectors. (New Scientist Sept 2012)

Don’t please think about your subconscious mind.  All the filthiness of this psychoanalysis does unspeakable harm. (family planning pioneer Marie Stopes)


Arrive with three amazing or entertaining stories. At the very least dress beautifully, smile gleefully and be gracious. (Cleo Rocos on surviving parties)

Now most people know that verse and we use that out of context to say 'this the college I want to go to, this is the boyfriend or girlfriend I want and this is the job I want, so those are my plans and now God declares that.' (poet Jefferson Bethke on Jeremiah 29:11)

The trouble with women is that they mistake symbolic gesture for effective action. (Simone de Beauvoir)

I've seen a number of men make mistake of assuming feelings are performances to get a response; not things that are a fact. (@MarkOneinFour)

Literature's powers of subtle signification are too often over-read as proof of the impossibility of signification. (Byzantine Ambassador ‏@byzantinepower)

The EU are doing that thing – when you go out with someone and they want YOU to dump THEM, so they start behaving really badly. (HIGNFY)

Just marry SOMEBODY! (Patricia Hodge as Miranda’s mother in Miranda)

Parents like to see that you’re doing well and earning money. (Fern Britton Dec 2014)

As Cicero said, "If it's idiotic, it probably wasn't said by Plato or Einstein”. (@oldandrewuk)

Some themes deep in the heart of Toryism just never go away. Up they pop, over and over. Control the lower orders, stop them breeding, check their spending, castigate their lifestyles. (Polly Toynbee, Dec 2014)

There’s still a culture of disbelief when it comes to rape. (BBC Breakfast, January 2014)

Dinner parties: meetings of bourgeois anonymous. (Nirpal Dhaliwal)

The Two Marks, who used to juggle and unicycle in the old school Arts Council style. (wherediditallgorightblog.wordpress.com But it was so avant garde!)

The Govt of the USA is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion. (John Adams)

Business books are basically romance novels for men. Silly fantasies, terrible writing, large type, cheap paper and one good idea per book. (@BenedictEvans 27 Nov 2011)

Dec 24 The birth in a slum of a homeless family's son who preached peace & resistance & was killed by cowards, the state & the police. #Christmas (Greg Carr @AfricanaCarr)

Only eating and sleeping could be said to have a stronger grasp on the steering wheel of our daily behaviour than the thing in our heads that is constantly urging us to find love and have sex... If they are hot, the girls can pick and choose which men they interact with. (jonmillward.com on an internet dating experiment)

Person on #r4today: 'The one thing that despots fear is laughter.' Well, sort of. They also fear Soviet shock armies & strategic bombing. (Dan 'Let it' Snow @thehistoryguy)

More here, and links to the rest.

The Ruth Rendell Mysteries

I promised to review the Ruth Rendell mysteries for Past Offences' 1987 challenge, but second time round couldn't get through Ep 1 of Series 1. An eccentric young woman has gone missing, and her hopeless myopic artist brother looms large - literally. His bottle-bottom glasses fill the screen.

Rendell's series characters are established. Gruff, older Reg Wexford (George Baker) is the liberal one, and skinny, younger Mike Burden (Christopher Ravenscroft) is the uptight conservative. He complains of the missing woman "She's 28! Why isn't she married?" He is also repelled by her lack of housekeeping skills (her cottage is a filthy tip, and this is too much dwelt on by the director).

In the 80s, we were going to remake everything - gender roles, housework and all. (Just like we tried to in the 70s and 60s.) I feel Rendell is struggling to be relevant. I wish the series had started with From Doon with Death, her first book. (Her early books are wonderfully snobbish – perhaps her editors asked her to tone it down, and keep up with the times.)

What else do I remember from the series (which I enjoyed when it was first screened)? It captures the atmosphere of ordinary English people leading ordinary lives in ordinary flats, houses, pubs, offices – thanks to real locations. The top-rank actors like Imelda Staunton, Sylvia Sims and Lesley Joseph.
I was annoyed as usual by soapy details about the series characters. In A Sleeping Life (great plot), we get way way too much of Wexford's daughter, who's quit her husband thanks to some ill-digested feminism. Why must fictional feminists be stroppy all the time? Couldn't they be coldly rational? In this episode Wexford quite unnecessarily visits France (as do the film crew, lucky them). There's a lot of faff about oysters and chablis. What's that all about? Eighties middle-class aspirational lifestyle?

More mystery here.