Standing Ovation

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."

Better than I used to be

Take your memories, I don’t need them.

Light up, light up, as if you have a choice, even if you cannot hear my voice.

Now you’re just somebody that I used to know.

She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today’s Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn’t such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most.
David Nicholls (One Day)


There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
William Shakespeare