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What if a sense of humour is like hair — something a lot of man lose as they get older?

In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity. The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity. It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle.

I’ve been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains.

Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds.

But I'd felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where the money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it.

Always at bottom there is a divine revelation, a divine act, and man has only had the bright idea of copying it. That is how the crafts all came into existence and is why they all have a mystical background. In primitive civilizations one is still aware of it, and this accounts for the fact that generally they are better craftsmen than we who have lost this awareness. If we think that every craft, whether carpenter's or smith's or weaver's, was a divine revelation, then we understand better the mystical process which certain creation myths characterize as God creating the world like a craftsman. By creating the world through such a craft he manifests a secret of his own mysterious skill.

By the early seventies I had become an Englishman — that is to say, I hated England just as much as half my compatriots seemed to do.

Sometimes life has a habit of flooding over you and rushing you along in its overwhelming tide. (p63)

I despise the weak. Why? Because the weak need not remain weak. Listen! Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was the division amongst them. Why? Because a people united in faith are stronger than the bomb. They shall not tremble or run away before the sword.”

The moon was drenching the sky with loneliness. (p107)

He loved them deeply, but sometimes love becomes a power game between the ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves. (p66)

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.