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1 " Unless you’re God and you know everything, including the past and the future, most of life is pretty much a question of closing your eyes and stabbing at a map. You have to try not to give yourself a hard time when things turn out to be not as good as you’d hoped. "
― Nick Alexander , You Then, Me Now
2 " breakfast, I again tried to convince Mum to "
3 " Oh, I try not to regret things too much,’ Mum said. ‘Unless you’re God and you know everything, including the past and the future, most of life is pretty much a question of closing your eyes and stabbing at a map. You have to try not to give yourself a hard time when things turn out to be not as good as you’d hoped. "
4 " In that instant, I was a tiny grain of life gifted with being able to observe the inexplicable vastness of the universe, and the only thing that mattered was the excruciating beauty of being there. Of being there to experience it all. "
5 " We value cleverness and intelligence and strength. Money, too. But nice is incredibly special. And it’s not so easy to be this way all the time, you know? Other people are very difficult. It takes a lot of effort to understand them and stay nice despite everything. "
6 " I’m exhausted by your lies. By all the pretence. By the constant . . . I don’t know . . . the constant obfuscation, I suppose, is the word. "
7 " As humans, we’re designed to be able to love people despite their imperfections, and that’s just as well really, because as a race, we do seem to have so many of them. "
8 " Men have a fight-or-flight response, they say. For women, it’s fight or flight, or freeze. Because in the face of overpowering physical strength, our overriding instinct is to survive, to not die here. I went numb, suspending my consciousness. It was a technique I had perfected as a child during beatings. "
9 " my pink "
10 " I often think that if men realised how much time you spend as a woman pleading with men – pleading with them to stop doing what they’re doing, or pleading with them to let you do whatever needs to be done – they’d understand a lot more about what our lives are like. "
11 " It doesn’t look poor. The place looks "
12 " Never choose a man while under the influence of chemicals that mess with your brain, my friends. Never. "
13 " Later on, he would tell me that people often told him their problems, so perhaps he just had one of those faces. Actually, it wasn’t his face, I don’t think. It was his soul. He had one of those souls that makes you want to bare your own. "
14 " often think that if men realised how much time you spend as a woman pleading with men – pleading with them to stop doing what they’re doing, or pleading with them to let you do whatever needs to be done – they’d understand a lot more about what our lives are like. "
15 " I understood that I was a fairly highly strung person, that my default state was one of readiness. I had rarely felt completely comfortable in my skin or at ease with my surroundings. I was always in a state of alert, on the lookout for any kind of menace or danger, and events and people had often proved me right because, I suppose, my judgement simply wasn’t that good. I suspect much of this came from my upbringing, which had rarely felt relaxed, or even happy. "
16 " Even now, I struggle to convince myself that I’m a fully grown adult, doing fully adult things. I’m not sure the ageing, wrinkled exterior ever quite convinces the innocent inner child that this is the real deal, that this is what’s really happening. "
17 " politicians are the same, i.e. useless, whereas I obstinately cling to the hope that some are at least less useless than others. "
18 " don’t we all have moments of madness? "
19 " I explain all of this because consent, of course, is a huge and complex issue. And sex without consent is rape. But did Conor rape me that first time? I still struggle to decide. Younger women than myself with more clearly defined boundaries tell me it’s perfectly simple these days. If you say ‘no’ – in fact, if you haven’t clearly said ‘yes’ – then it’s rape. And I’m genuinely glad for them that things have moved on, that there’s debate on these issues – that there’s a concerted effort to define, clearly, for everyone concerned, exactly what consent means. "
