"You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him."

Advice from the devil in "The Screwtape Letters," which I found doing a search in my ebook, looking for boredom, which I did after this outburst of mine on the topic of boredom and the devil.

In "The Screwtape Letters," the devil tells of a man who arrives in hell and says: "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked." He was damned not because of indulgence in "sweet sins" but because he spent his time "in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off."