Spectacles Quotes

“Memories are slippery bastards – bring them into the light, handle them too often, they’ll bend, change colour. Keep them in the dark and they’ll slowly retreat to a place you can’t find them.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays, surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn't going the way we want it, we can stand and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“I hate that phrase – ‘beat cancer’. Cancer isn’t a war or a fight that you win or lose. It’s bad luck. It’s bad genes. It’s bad timing. It’s a postcode lottery. Call it what you will, just don’t call it a fight. Doing so makes all those who don’t make it weak. Or losers. I hate that.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“I’ve never really responded to peer pressure. What I do respond to, however, is someone categorically telling me I can’t do something. I trill at the sound of a gauntlet going down. It feels like a dare. And I’ve never been able to resist a dare.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“Music asks questions that your head will attempt to answer, but only your heart can truly understand. If you try to hide your heart, then you are not a musician.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“approximately 25 per cent of Laos’s villages are still contaminated with unexploded devices from wartime raids, which rained death from the sky, on average, every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day for nine years.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“The South West is like a Christmas stocking – all the nuts end up at the bottom.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“I did once go horse riding, but I actually like my vagina so refused to do it again.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“If there’s one thing I hate more than trophy killing, it’s taxidermy. You’ve killed it. Don’t take the piss. Don’t fill it with sand and make it play poker with a load of animals that it would have made mincemeat of in the wild, for God’s sake.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“All cats are grey. This pithy little saying originates from John Heywood’s book of proverbs, published in 1546: ‘When all candles be out, all cats be grey.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“Describing how sound recording equipment worked in the 1980s to a teenager today is like a Homo habilis explaining how he used to slap mammoths to death to the Homo erectus who has just invented the spear. Even as you describe the process, you feel as obsolete in the world as the technology you’re describing.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“The essayist and lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson famously once said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ Well, Samuel, when a woman is tired of London, she usually tries to get away for the weekend – you know, get some perspective. She doesn’t tend to think of it as a precursor for ending her existence. My advice would be: stop being so absolutist in your thinking. Think about changing it up. Failing that, some of the modern SSRIs are really very good.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles

“Sometimes we don’t want to be tethered to yesterday. It’s nicer to forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it’s so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays. Surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies. So, even if the present isn’t going the way we want it, we can stand back and remember our earlier selves as exciting and funny and daring.”
― Sue Perkins, Spectacles