Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? Quotes

“Indolence has always been my most essential quality. ‘Essential’ in the sense that it is the single quality I am convinced I possess and by which I can be recognised and remembered, and also in the sense that I feel most essentially like myself when I am exercising it. I cannot recollect a time when the idea of going for a walk was not a torment to me; a proposition that endangered my constant wish to stay where I was. I imagine myself, child and adult, curled up in an armchair, reading and being told (as a child) or invited (as an adult) to go out and do something. I cannot think why a person sitting with evident contentment in an armchair causes the desire in others for their immediate activity.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?

“I have a special place devoted to worry that has an insatiable hunger to be filled. When it’s empty, it worries anyway about what it’s going to worry about. A sick kitten is ideal worry-material.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays

“Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there”,’ I instructed. ‘Also, I’d like a dove, a winged angel, an anchor and an open book, properly carved on a nice piece of granite.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays

“stickability.”
― Jenny Diski, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?: Essays