More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Occam’s Razor – the theory that the simplest answer is usually the correct one.
I don’t believe in God, obviously. We live in a time of science and the Kardashians, so I think I’m safely in the sane camp there.
As a child, I used to throw tremendous tantrums and dive on the floor if something displeased me, as my mother gazed on in amusement and apologised to those around us. That sense of drama lives on inside me, but I’ve long learnt to keep it in check.
Mothers are adept at providing love from all angles, so much so that you often don’t realise you’re missing out on love from other people until much later in life.
disassociation, when your brain disconnects to protect you from stress or trauma. It’s a horrendous feeling but it has served me well in times
People so often just want you to hold up a mirror for their own opinions.
One guy ordered hundreds of pounds’ worth of food and then refused to eat any of it. The guards were so furious at this display of independence that nobody gets that final treat now. His fellow prisoners will curse his name, but I admire that man’s determination to piss off everyone to the last.
It’s horrible having to do a U-turn when you realise that you can get something out of someone, isn’t it? Suddenly having to flatter and praise a potential donor who’s been leering at you all night, or laughing at the jokes of a guy who will pay for every round of drinks? You feel slightly dirty. But really, everything in life is a trade.
The best years of your life are said to be those which whizz by in your early twenties when you can drink and party and live spontaneously.
Women who want to tell you all about their sexual journey as if enjoying sex is a character trait. Couples who put up photos of themselves entwined in bed sheets on social media, pretending that their post-coital bragging is art.
That made him laugh. Men often laugh with surprise when they find women funny, as though it’s a skill we’re not expected to possess.
Liking Goodfellas over all other films means the man has never bothered to cultivate a personality.
I feel quite often that it’s good not to know what goes on in the male mind. If we did, I suspect we would spend a lot of our lives in fearful despair.
Men who turn their lights full beam on you for a few seconds and leave you chasing that artificial warmth for the rest of your life. It wrecks you and doesn’t leave a mark on them. But I learnt that early. Wilde never did. Perhaps then, he could have learnt something from me. Never yearn for the light that some men will shine on you for the briefest of moments. Snuff it out instead. *
Never trust an artificial redhead – their need to be different and interesting marks them out as neither)
modern life is 75 per cent cancelling plans and both parties feeling relieved
He proposed on her birthday. I don’t mean to imply that Jimmy has no spontaneity but people who propose on big meaningful dates lack imagination. I cannot envisage a worse day to get down on one knee than a family Christmas where your dad started on the Buck’s Fizz by 11 a.m.
Life is so short, and we spend so much of it talking to terrible people about the minutiae of their nothing lives.
Maybe it’s like when women drive themselves insane wondering why a man they’re dating hasn’t called, ascribing reason after reason until they land upon something completely labyrinthian like, ‘He likes you so much but after losing his father at an early age he’s got complex issues with emotional intimacy and not calling is a sign that he’s actually falling in love with you and probably just needs space but not too much space – you should send him a gift of your own hair,’ when actually, he’s just completely forgotten all about you.
The only thing worse than someone who enthusiastically devours all pop culture and spews it up (wearing a T-shirt that says ‘We should all be feminists’ while queuing up for forty-five minutes to buy the latest trainers made by women in a sweatshop) is someone who takes pride in not understanding new trends.
You’re not better than that. You don’t get points for deliberately trying to avoid learning about what’s happening around you. And you’ve almost certainly looked at the Mail Online in the past month,
I’ve never thought about how deliberately small I’d made my life, always filled with anger directed at people who never thought of me at all.
