Js

“Just when you think something can’t get any worse someone who dislikes you comes to watch.”
― Denise Mina, Conviction

“it is 1958 and men don’t really have words for feelings”
― Denise Mina, The Long Drop

“What I wish I had known, age twenty-one, as I cycled away from the results board towards the meadow by the river in Cambridge, where I would throw stones into the water and cry, is that nobody ever asks you what degree you got. It ceases to matter the moment you leave university. That the things in life which don’t go to plan are usually more important, more formative, in the long run, than the things that do.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

“You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don't, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You're selfish and rigid and absorbed, you're like an infant.”
― Olivia Laing, Crudo