That when you have said all you can about something, it is OK to be done. Shut up and walk away.

—Things I’ve Learnt This Year, Patrick Rhone

I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.

— Frederic Chopin

— K.V.

“Give a man a mask and he will show his true face.”

— Oscar Wilde.

One last time, he left the world behind.

—Passing, Jesper

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

— Richard Buckminster Fuller

A big definition of who you are as a designer is the way that you look at the world. And I guess it’s one of the curses of what you do; you’re constantly looking at something and thinking, “Why is it like that? Why is it like that and not like this?”. And in that sense, you’re constantly designing.

— Apple Design, Jonathan Ive

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

— Hugh Laurie Sings The Blues, Hugh Laurie

However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

—Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, Stanley Kubrick and Gene D. Phillips

In my parents I had the perfect combination—a resistant father and an encouraging mother. My mother convinced me I could do anything. And my father said, “Prove it.” He didn’t think I could make a living. Resistance produces muscularity. And it was the perfect combination because I could use my mother’s belief to overcome my father’s resistance. My father was a kind of a metaphor for the world, because if you can’t overcome a father’s resistance you’re never going to be able to overcome the world’s resistance. It’s much better than having completely supportive parents or completely resistant parents.

—Talks with Milton Glaser

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”

— Dalai Lama XIV

Apologising does not always mean that you are wrong and the other person is right. It just means that you value your relationship more than your ego.

—via Reddit

As for the gameplay, initially I wasn’t particularly impressed. It just felt like a more futuristic version of Far Cry. However, after playing through the demo a couple of times, the subtle excellence of the game started to come across. Because most of the environment is destructible, you can hurt people in really creative ways. One guy was inside a shack, so I activated the “strength” powerup and threw a heavy crate through the wall, killing the guy inside. You can pick almost everything up, including chickens; I haven’t killed anyone with a chicken yet, but I’m working on it.

I have certainly killed some chickens, however. Jesus Christ have I killed some chickens. I stuck a can of gasoline in a coop, set fire to it and ran. I activated Strength and flung a chicken far, far into the sea. I picked up a chicken and used it to punch another chicken, killing them both. I stole a jeep and cut down a whole bunch of chickens with my mounted machine gun, before running over their mangled bodies and laughing in a way that is wrong. I have sniped hens from 200 metres with my reflex scope; I have grenaded pullets and watched in awe as their bodies carved a graceful arc across the sky, finally coming to rest on the top of a burning barrel; I have rifle-butted, kicked, helmeted, chaired, shrubbed, wheeled and dead-korean-soldiered every feathery clucking object in this game multiple times, and I am still not bored.

In fact, I’m enjoying hurting livestock more than playing the actual game. I haven’t even got started on the crabs, turtles, kiwis and seagulls yet, but believe me, I’m formulating plans. I’ve noticed a couple of butterflies flitting about, and I intend to ascertain the effect on Chaos Theory when a butterfly flaps its wings in a forest shortly before being rammed through a tree by a jeep full of burning chickens.

—Crysis (not Far Cry 2), comment by Camerhil

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

—Mark Twain

Why do people obsess over the idea of afterlife, when the emptiness before their birth offers no challenge to their imagination?

—Nick Nelson

What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

—The Matrix, Morpheus

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.”

—Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights, Cyril Connolly