“It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's double shaming - shaming to REMEMBER as well, to fee so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory.” SchoolChildhoodChildhood Memories Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“This was the real thing, boys in the flesh. All the prohibitions, especially the ones that stayed unvoiced, had made boys much more exotic; it was as though we'd never met one. The whole school hummed with excitement and the headmistress's aspect softened with anticipation, for she was about to let the dangerous genie of adolescent sex out of its bottle and tame it. She spoke in veiled, suggestive terms in assembly of freedom and responsibility, and we giggled uneasily - it was all vaguely shocking, like being tickled by a policeman.” SchoolSexualityAdolescents Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“I'm not sure what the moral of the bathroom-stool story is. Perhaps this: it's a good idea to settle for a few loose ends, because even if everything in your life is connected to everything else, that way madness lies.” LifeMoralMadness Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.” SinAnti Heroes Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.” Books Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“I’m digressing, wandering away from my mother’s world – but that was always exactly the point of the books, you could escape into them.” BooksEscape Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“I was well on the way to tacking together a sort of nature religion to make up fro Grandpa's defection, an apotheosis of the back of beyond, in which I was just another thinking thing, neuter, drab, camouflaged. There'd be sermons in stones, and books to read in the haybarn, for ever and ever. Amen.” ReligionReadingNatureYouthCountrysideOutdoorsFarm LifeTomboy Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot. She stayed furious all the days of her life - so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife.” WomenMarriageFeminismPropagandaEstrangementDomesticitySocial PressureWifely Duty Author:Lorna Sage
“And we clung to each other in a shelter smelling of orange peel and piss on the promenade, and shrieked with glee, like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus.” Friendship QuoteGirlfriendship Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“Like all the girls back then I knew that being too clever was much worse than being too tall. Being five foot three, tongue-tied and blonde I mostly passed muster, except that I was so unskilled in small talk that I sometimes blurted big words (hypocrisy, or pretentiousness), which jumped out of my mouth like the toads of the fairy tale before I knew it. In any case, you could cultivate the wrong sort of silence - the sort that implied brooding self-absorption rather than attentiveness.” Women WritersIntelligence Is Attractive Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“He seemed to be having trouble remembering the steps, for he was pumping my arm and counting under his breath (one, two, three), and his breath smelled like the open maws of the pub cellars that grapes on Whitchurch pavements on delivery day. Beer.” DanceBeerAwkwardness Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood
“The children of violently unhappy marriages, like my mother, are often hamstrung for life, but the children of happier marriages have problems too - all the worse, perhaps, because they don't have virtue on their side.” ChildrenHappy MarriageUnhappy Marriage Book:Bad Blood Source: Bad Blood