Ex Nihilo

Sample of Abandoned Lines/Thoughts from my Nearly-Finished Oscar Wilde Notebook:

We all have some pretty strange ideas at three in the morning.

All buildings are monuments to the second law of thermodynamics.

A caramelised shopping trolley in the Stygian gloom.

The t-shirt reads ‘Proud to be Bland’.

The Existential Bicycle is leaning

against a wall, attempting nonchalance.

Songs of Independence? Revenge of the Untalented.

Childhood: everything is either forbidden or compulsory.

I try to persuade the next-door-neighbour’s cat to become a jihadist.

‘The pointless enthusiasm for useless knowledge’ – Seneca

The Vital Importance of Frivolity.

The point isn’t 'Is war ever justified?' but 'Is war avoidable?'

I stand in the kitchen and shout illegal exhortations to violence. 

Existential despair at not knowing how or why or when it all started is a little like.

‘It was very ghost-like.’

‘You mean, it didn’t exist?’

Beware the virtue of the sentimental.

'You’ve got your whole life ahead of you, and if that isn’t enough of a curse, I don’t know what is.’

Be a scholar not a bore, to misquote Seneca (‘make you appear more a bore than a scholar’ which, I think, sums up pedants rather nicely).

Do not lose the day in waiting for the night.