Slags Quotes

“Boomer parents told their X-er and millennial daughters they could do it all, but they forgot to tell their sons to pull their weight as fathers. So you have all these burnt-out women. Fucked. Furious at their husbands. And their husbands have no idea why. They’re fucking outraged, too. They weren’t prepared for this. And THAT is why I have these fucking haemorrhoids.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“The 90s were beautiful, though. The freedom. We memorised phone numbers. We memorised directions. No one knew what we looked like. No one knew our reasons. No one could reach us. We were gods – and we didn’t know it.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“She talked about how she’d overcome the problem like you might in a job interview or an application. It was a pitch. She presented a shiny, complete story. Look what I made! She left no space for anyone to help her. This was why she couldn’t be vulnerable. Her patriarchal view of strength and success meant no one got a look-in. Even now, on the path to enlightenment, the thought of sitting with someone in her own emotional mess made Sarah cringe.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“You're fifteen, aren't you?
Yeah, so I know what I'm talking about.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Got kids?’ Now Sarah had dealt with this frankly fucking insanely impolite question in various ways. I had a miscarriage this morning. I suffered early menopause. I have cancer of the womb. I had a baby once but I killed it, and prison was super boring – so I won’t be doing THAT again! Anything to shame them into considering their words and realising that this is a very personal, potentially pain-triggering question that you should under no circumstances ask a stranger.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“And then.
There he is.
The man who ruined my life.
Him.
His name has haunted me. His face has stared out at me from newspapers. His body has been the defining shape of every bad fuck, every phantasmic rejection.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“This was the point it always reached, then. Wanting to go home. The excitement of any trip, any meeting, burned fast to a cold ash of desire to be alone again.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“She had always believed it: love does not advance by weddings; love advances by funerals. Fear and death. Those were the things that kept people together. Fuck love. Love was for teenagers.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“All that chat about becoming more right-wing as you get older, I think it's balls. I think we're all born right-wing . Fascism isn't something people grow into; it's something you grow out of. Fascism is the factory setting for humans.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“The thing that scares me the most is living a little life that's just going to get smaller, like how my nana lived in smaller and smaller houses and then smaller and smaller flats until eventually they put her in her coffin - the space you're in just ends up shrinking until it's basically the size and shape of your skeleton and that's it.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“But Johnnie was more hilarious. [...] Always an hour away from an ice plunge. Always considering how to increase longevity. For what? To be deeply boring for a bit longer? [...] Longevity seemed pointless when you were as tedious as Johnnie. Worse still: it was rude. If you're going to live longer, make an effort to be at least halfway fucking interesting, mate.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“She could feel sorry for me, she really could, if they hadn't had it so fucking easy for so fucking long. Part of the joy of modern feminism was watching them squirm.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Sarah looked at her sister. Her only sister. Her only sibling. There she was, so close. In profile. [...] Juliette's silhouette was Sarah's most familiar ghost.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Show a person some fairy lights and booze and they were instantly at the mercy of nostalgia.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Sometimes things happened that were so bad they made your life stop and start again.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“When Molly was a baby, Sarah had felt as though she could have put her whole body in her mouth and eaten up the fruity little solidity of her. Watching Molly learn and grow was the purest delight Sarah had ever known — she surrendered to another female's glory, maybe even for the first time in her lite. But when Juliette had told Sarah she was pregnant again, with a boy of all things, Sarah had felt ransacked. A boy? Why the need for that?”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“when they were growing up and their mum had referred to her period as ‘Horace’. Like”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Sarah”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“It made Sarah think of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal, the computer that went rogue. She was fearful of robots thanks to Hal. She always said thank you to Siri. And Alexa.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Sarah thought: it didn’t matter who you fell in love with. What mattered was how you sold the inevitably disappointing resulting situation to yourself. That was real adult life.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Alfa Romeo (a fuckboy car if ever she saw one;”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags