Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” Kurt Vonnegut

"The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death — these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all." Albert Camus

“A woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.” Carl Jung

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” Kurt Vonnegut

"We do not buy paintings because we love them; we love them because we buy them." Georges Feydeau

“When one’s young, everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.” Sybille Bedford

"Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency." John Updike

"If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe." Lord Salisbury

“People who like quotes love meaningless generalisations.” Graham Greene

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut

"Drugs are instead of people." Eric Berne

"If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. … you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing." Carl Jung

"There were only ever two rational choices. One was a total lockdown until all vulnerable groups had been vaccinated, which would have been politically impossible if the Government had been upfront about it. The other was a voluntary system under which people were allowed to take responsibility for their own risk assessments. Anything else just prolongs the agony." Lord Sumption

"So why did we lock down? ‘Essentially because other countries had done it and people started saying the solution to any problem like this is government action. If they are doing it on the other side of the Channel why aren’t we doing it?’ That, adds Sumption, is ‘not a very impressive argument’.
"Neither is he moved by the suggestion that it was difficult for the UK Government to resist the pressure for a lockdown and therefore unfair to pillory them for it. He points out that they had a plan for dealing with a pandemic but failed to stick to it. What they did not have was any strategy for a lockdown.
"‘If you are going to do something as drastic as this, you need to know what the consequences are likely to be – that requires serious thought, serious research and serious planning. None of these things happened,’ he says. ‘The dominant factor in Government policy – the entire attack on our humanity – has been guided not by “The Science” but by the desire of politicians to avoid being criticised.’" Lord Sumption interviewed by the Daily Telegraph