Quotes from Clifford Thurlow

We see on our death bed, not our whole life flashing before us – as with a drowning man – but an endless sequence of all the things we had wanted to do and had never done.

Beauty doesn't see itself and when it does something is lost.

There is a myth I grew up with and heard so many times that I had believed it. They say money doesn't buy you happiness. This is a delusion the poor cling to and the rich find comical. Money does buy happiness. Money equals freedom, the highest form of happiness. Money equals pleasure. The more you have the more pleasurable life is. People with money can never know what it is like to be without money. Money is a magnet, it doesn't trickle down, it is sucked up.

People carry in their hearts an inconsolable longing for something and they are never quite sure what it is.

The rich and powerful like to appear conformist, God-fearing, vaguely naïve and permanently jolly because they are none of those things.

Worrying about what 'people are going to say' and 'what the neighbours might think' is always in the minds of working people. They aren't afraid of failure. They are afraid of success and how they would have to make excuses to their friends if it ever came their way.

Love is a beautiful tapestry woven by two people and the moment it is complete they keep going until they unpick every thread.

Artists often feel sad without knowing why. They sense the cruel inevitability of fate. They smell the coppery scent of death. All artists live in a permanent state of angst knowing that what they have created could have been better.

Dust. You forget about the dust. It hangs over the landscape like a ragged curtain. It scratches your throat. The air tastes of sulphur, saltpetre, cordite, burning rubber and burning oil from the pipelines and wells sabotaged by ISIS to disrupt aerial surveillance.

Sunflowers know the secret of life is to follow the sun.

If all your dreams have broken and gone, if you feel isolated in your own private world, go out this minute and buy a sunflower. Place it on a sunny shelf, give it a little water every day – not too much – and as its big yellow face turns to the sun you will feel your lips lift in a smile knowing that you have learned the secret life of sunflowers.

It's lost time that matters, the time between time, the moments when you forget time and things just happen.

Love is like being burned in flames then plunged into icy water. Love leaves scars and broken hearts. Your emotions change from one second to the next.

There is when making love a moment when the body defies gravity. This is the moment to strive for.

One way to ruin your life is to have dreams bigger than your abilities.

If you reach a crossroads and your destination is to the left and by mistake you turn right, the further you travel along the wrong road the further you will move away from your destination. It is not easy to turn back, to change your mind. Sometimes, you have to in order to survive.

An inconsolable longing describes that aching sense of waiting and dissatisfaction that regularly clouds our thoughts; that feeling that in the deepest depths of existence all we will find is a void.

Writing is a journey with no maps, no ending, no guides (except charlatans) and often no point. Still we do it.

Money lets you be who you really are.

Existentialists believe there is no purpose to life other than pleasure, but pleasure drifts like cigarette smoke into melancholy and ennui. A glass of absinthe and you are living the life. Drink a bottle and you're dead.

I could smell her perfume. It was light and airy, a scent I didn't know, and seemed personal to her. She was so beautiful, I couldn't bear to look at her.

The horizon is 25 miles away. You keep walking to towards the horizon and it just keeps moving back. Life is like that. You never reach your goal. We are doomed to disappointment because in our pursuit of perfection we are constantly reminded that we will never reach it. The goal, like the horizon, is beyond our reach.

The horizon is 25 miles away. You keep walking towards the horizon and it just keeps moving back. Life is like that. We are doomed to disappointment because in our pursuit of perfection we are constantly reminded that we will never reach it. The goal, like the horizon, is beyond our reach.

When friends say we'll see you again soon, keep in touch, it means you will never see them again. Friendship is like fire. You have to keep feeding it or the fires goes out.