Another great line that I could have sat for aeons pounding away at the keyboard and never come up with.

Honore De Balzac, please come on stage, and take a bow, for these are your fine words: " A great writer is just simply a martyr the stake cannot kill".

I'm neither, but to have thought this up is a prize in itself, and it does n't end there. Further on in Lost Illusions, which is where I was electrified by this line is another fragment of clear sighted genius "....the tremor of self-consciousness...".

I do n't think I've read such an apposite line that so succinctly sums up the utter gawkiness and stomach churning angst, the meek, the bashful, and the timid undergo in all manner of areas.

Not my words. The best ones never usually are, nor to my chagrin, are original thoughts. But if I can't mine them out of virgin soil, I can certainly put them on the shelves for others to look at. So here's a novel look at paranoia: "People are out to get you, but fortunately they're out to get us too, so the amount of time they have for you is diminished" End result: don't worry.

Wise words, Answer Girl, hope you don't mind me sharing them.

Coming home this evening on the bus, I overheard, and then saw, a young mother cajoling her toddler to eat his dinner; there was love, there was affection in her tone, her words were dripping with it, but where was her thought? The kid's dinner was chicken nuggets and a handful of fries scattered in to the tray of his pushchair. Looking at the way he ate and the set of his face, this was n't the first, second, or probably third time, he had a fast food dinner.

I'm guessing at how old he was, two, three, maybe four, and already he had an uncomfortable pudginess that probably is going to dog him all of his life: concomitant poor health, body image issues, self-esteem battles. Except that fatness, right now, is virtually the norm. It's everywhere.

There's a handful of books that I've enjoyed so much that I've felt I ought never to re-read as to do so might expose frailties and weaknesses that I missed the first (and only) time I read them.

Strange vow, perhaps, to seal away an impression in the manner of Miss Havisham's dress, but these books have had that effect, and I've kept the memories preserved in amber. Obviously, the edges blur and the skin starts to sag; nevertheless, I've kept temptation at bay, for decades in some case, and not re-read them.

Until this week.

Amongst the swirling, icy mists where these glorious few books are cryogenically stored is Zola's Therese Raquin. I read it, or to be precise, swallowed it whole in one day, nearly thirty years ago; it was a recommended text of a course on literary naturalism I was taking at University.

Started it in the morning, took it through lunch, on into the afternoon, and reached the end sometime in the evening, and then interred it. Too precious, too good, to ever re-read.

I've seen it in countless bookshops since, looked at it resting on the shelves of several libraries, and held back from a reacquaintance. This week I did n't. There's been a copy gazing at me more or less every time I've been browsing the fiction stock in the Camomile Street library.

Gauntlet dropped. Gauntlet picked up. I took it out, opened it up and read it breathlessly, albeit it over a slightly longer period, two days unlike the first time.

As powerful and as passionate as the first time, and no flaws found.

Knight's move thinking. It's psychiatric meaning is quite strict from what I've gathered from searching on line, and as so, it's literal meaning does stand at odds to how I see it, but when a new phrase hoves into sight, grab it is what I say, and I have.

What it encapsulates are those abrupt ruptures in a smoothly running conversation, those completely unexpected notions or ideas that appear without any warning, often illogical as compared that is to the direction the conversation or dialogue was taking previously. A completely fresh, novel association. And often the breakthrough moment is just a few seconds away.

The image is obvious if you have even the most casual brush with chess; the Knight and it's peculiar leapfrogging, oblique gait.

I can't think of a better, more exhilarating tool in the thinker's tool-kit than this: permission to jump around, think past and beyond a roadblock, and free-associate to your heart's content.

Anything that can unlock creativity, especially if it's something as simple an image as this, but one jam-packed with possibility and indulgence, has to be celebrated.

I like things that don't make me feel as if I'm trapped in a corner, that I have options even in the tightest situations, which is why I'm so taken with this concept.

Walking through Westfield this afternoon, I thought of someone I know who was there earlier this month shopping for a Wedding Ring.

Quite why this came into my mind, I don't know, just that it did, and it's been hovering in my mind ever since; I've finally picked up on the manifold symbolism of the ring, above and beyond signalling that a person is married and in a state of union. It's this: as women generally outlive their men, then for so many widows that ring finger will be a permanent reminder of their partner's touch.

Now I understand why so many elderly women stroke their ring fingers - they're bringing back a memory, almost Aladdin like, conjuring up the genie of times past.

Ever pondered this question. I have. Millions of us have, but, what does Art do for us ? Just what indeed. I know now, and it's a most beautiful summation: Art "...gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and in so doing places a seal of eternity upon them".

The seal of eternity. I love that sense of consecration, of things being handed on from hand to hand to be appraised and discussed, critiqued and enjoyed, argued and fought over, loved, and it's antithesis, hated. Never static, always moving on.

I found these passionate words in a novel of Muriel Barbery's - The Elegance of Hedgehogs - which I devoured in one afternoon sat on a park seat in Vichy last week.

Vichy was a breakthrough trip: I did as I promised myself I would - read until the muscles in my eyeballs twitched and when I was n't doing that, I simply sat marvelling at the huge flocks of starlings flashing over the river to their roosts every sunset and the crackling, cawing rooks spiralling in their hundreds over the poplar trees before they headed towards to their night time home in the Esplanade.

Oh God....England just qualified for the World Cup. We'll never hear the last of this. The triumphalist press will be in overdrive tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that...

This time last night I was bracing my unconscious for one hell of a ride after snacking on an absinthe spiced bar of dark chocolate. I was hoping. I really was hoping. Nothing happened. Probably predictable given that there was no more than a breath of absinthe in there. But I did wonder whether the doors to some sort of perception might have cracked ajar; they did n't. Nothing did. Just a headache in the morning as the fallout from eating chocolate late at night. That, and an aniseed flavoured tongue.

I predict a riot going on in my unconscious tonight. I've been tucking into a bar of the darkest, dark chocolate one of my friends brought back from Italy; and it has a character all of it's own - it's been generously spiced with absinthe.

And Baudelaire used to go to the trouble of drinking it...if only someone had told him to try it in chocolate.

There's a woman who I have carried a torch through all weathers for, and for years as well. She is - I'm certain of this - very aware that I bear this burden. Delicious and frustrating in the same instance. She once told a crowd of people that I liked her, but more importantly (in my case) that she also liked me: I nearly fainted out of joy.

At least three people I know have had Swine flu, or if not that, then something virtually indistinguishable. Sweating, prone for days, barking, hacking coughs, streaming noses, aching bones, and so on.

I'm not entirely certain if I've had it or not. Something recognisably flu-like did knock me out in May though. So maybe I did...

Whatever it was did n't hang about. No slow, creeping barrage, this was the missile out of the blue.

I was having a meal with a friend in Canta Napoli, and we'd reached the dessert stage - so far, so healthy - then blitzkrieg: I broke out coughing and did n't stop for a week, plus got all the other nasties that tag along with flu. But not, surprisingly, the soaring temperature which seems to be swine flu's signature.

So maybe I did n't...

Except for the hard-shelled things like crabs, I enjoy fish.

Breaking something open with a hammer or tongs, or whatever it is, that's used to prise open shellfish does n't count as eating in my mind. It's demolition work. There's a place for that and it's not wherever it is you're eating.

What marks our generation, and certainly the one breathing over our shoulder, is it's endemic and infuriating inarticulacy. Straightforward conversation no longer happens. Once an anecdote might have unfolded in a reasonable narrative flow, A then B on to C, and so on, with an occasional space for an interjection or pause, it's changed now, the sequence has blown, every thing's jumbled. The interjection IS the conversation.

Those evil filler words - 'like' as in "she said...like...", " know what I mean" (I don't, so why are you insisting that I might?), and the cockroach of them all, innit - all of these pass as vocabulary for millions now.

Frightening enough just on their own; but when a conversation contains nothing but these, and everyone who's jabbering away knows precisely what everyone else is on about despite the utter paucity of expression, it's terrifying.

I've no idea how people understand each other. Perhaps it's all body language, or intonation that counts. I'm as mystified as I am saddened that we're in this state.

How we found our self peering down this linguistic dead-end is something I've yet to fathom. Someone I know has a theory which does hold water though; for him: "It's a symptom of being a stranger to prose narrative. It's an entire generation weaned on comic books, TV, and movies. Dialogue is all they know."

Not too far off the mark there. I'd also throw in the mesmerising effect of e-mail, text messaging, social media, the 140 character straitjacket that you know what makes people wear. The compulsion to talk when there's probably nothing to really talk about, and as nature abhors a vacuum then what else can we expect than filler words slithering in to take their place.

Thoreau got it right; people, he believed, behaved, "...as if the main object were to talk fast and not sensibly" This from a man who lived in mid nineteenth century America. That, in it's own way, throws up this puzzle: if he said that then and it's still true today, then what exactly is a good conversation? Does it need to follow my prescription, and only that, or can the two coexist without one asphyxiating the other?

The ease that some people have with words has to be celebrated.

The ability to conjure a prose poem out of the simplest of language is something I yearn for. Where every word has the correct ballast and the phrase sits in the water beautifully like the swan in a fairy tale.

Someone I know wrote the most sensual of words I've come across in months, maybe years, and I have to share it.

"The pasta is just there to hold the tomatoes, the Basil is just there to powerfully accent it, the olive oil cloaks it in loveliness, and the salt and pepper just give it the little kick in the pants the tomatoes love to reach their full glory"

There's a joy in this sentence that actually makes me want to eat it and as it's from a recipe then I probably will. There's no head strutting, no competition between any of the words - they all marvellously 'fit'.

I love that image of tomatoes being cloaked in their loveliness by olive oil; it's so unexpected, so memorable, and so apt. I can see the sheen of oil on the skin of the tomato even with my eyes tightly closed. I ran into this delightful sentence catching up on some of the recent items posted on Lazywoman.

I struggle with words, I know I do, I recognise it just as I recognise when I'm in the presence of someone who has the gift and can make them whisper and dance. And that's Lazywoman to a tee. A great writer.