How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

One way of imagining life is that it’s a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one.

Because the one thing I hate hearing more than ‘You’re not like the others’ is ‘You’re just like the others’.

you know that thing where you love and fancy your best friend so much that your heart aches like you’ve just slammed it in a door and you can’t tell anyone and you want to tear up the sky? No? Just me, then.’

‘Be soft, even if you stand to get squashed.’ E. M. Forster,