Kieran Boden 2008

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

from Fremder

Jonathan Cape 1996, p.32

Extracted from Mr Hoban’s seventh novel and dropped on 4 February 2008 in celebration of his eighty-third birthday

Alida Allison 2006

My yellow paper quote for 2006, placed randomly around Ouray, Colorado:

One wakes up in the morning and puts on oneself. Everyone has experienced this: the self must be put on before any garment, and there is inevitably a pause as it were a caesure in the going forward of things before the self is put on. Why is this? It is because our mortal identity is not the primary one, not the profound, not the deep one. No, what wakes up from sleep is not Tiglath-Pileser or Peter Schlemiel or Pilgermann; it is simpy raw undifferentiated being, brute being with nothing driving it but the forward motion imparted to it by the original explosion of being into the universe. For a fraction of a moment it is itself only; then it must with joy or terror put on that identity taken on with mortal birth, that identity that each morning is the cumulative total of its mortal days and nights, that self old or young, sick or well, brave or cowardly, beautiful or ugly, whole or mutilated, that is one's lot.

from Pilgermann

Bes',

alida

Chris Bell 2004

She took my hands again. “In each of us lives the little animal of the self: Nothing to do with the mind, it goes its own way; there is no talking to it. Sometimes it wants to live; sometimes it wants to die. Maybe you are in hospital for surgery, and while you are anaesthetised the little animal of the self makes up its mind. ‘OK,’ it says, ‘this time I don’t die.’ Or it says, ‘That’s it - I have had enough and now it’s time to pack it in.’”

- from MR RINYO-CLACTON'S OFFER

I don't think I've ever chosen a 'Rinyo-Clacton' quote for SA4QE before. The appropriate 4qlocation for this struck me as being the local cigar bar, 'Cuba', at the top of Parnell Road in Auckland. These pleasantly decadent surroundings are furnished with leather sofas, wooden venetian blinds and deep brown timbers, masked by a haze of expensive cigar smoke. Just the sort of place Mr Rinyo-Clacton would likely hang out, if ever he came here, I thought.

I left the quote on one of the tables late last night (about 12:15 a.m., Wednesday 4 February, 2004) and drank a toast of Laphroaig single malt to Russ.

Well being,
Chris