“Do you fall in love often?”

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.
Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

We often find ourselves telling a person to take a chill pill and take things easy. Well, a wife suspected of cheating prescribed a painkiller to her husband who had claimed he was hurt when he learnt his wife was cheating. The wife, Swaziland’s Minister of Culture, Sports and Youth Affairs, exact words were: “If my husband is hurting, he must buy Panado and drink it with lots and lots of water to relieve the pain.” Read full story here.

Found via Andrew Sullivan. Beautiful or what.

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography — to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

More deception.

Twitter users are increasingly buying followers in a bid to boost their online reputations. A number of firms are now catering to the demand for phantom followers, offering thousands of fake profiles for just a few pounds. They say their clients include bloggers, entrepreneurs and aspiring performers. – The Sunday Times