Moments later, I received a response: Twenty-first-century communication. I fear for our nation's standards of literacy.

Popular people sometimes have to laugh at things they don't find very funny, do things they don't particularly want to, with people whose company they don't particularly enjoy.

I'm not sure I'd like to be burned. I think I might like to be fed to zoo animals. It would be both environmentally friendly and a lovely treat for the larger carnivores. Could you request that, I...

The man who had served us was lounging at the counter, nodding his head in time with the music. It was a cacophonous din, with too many guitars and not enough melody. It was, I thought, the sound of...

There was, it seemed, no Eleanor-shaped social hole for me to slot into.

Then the beat changed abruptly and everyone started doing the same thing, making strange shapes with their arms above their head. It took me a moment or two to learn the shapes, and then I was able to...

In most professions, getting older means getting better at your job, earning respect because of your seniority and experience. If your job depends on your looks, the opposite is true-how depressing....

arranged all the tins in the cupboard so that the labels were facing forwards in zetabetical order.

Sometimes all you need is to have someone pleasant by your side while dealing with things.

I understood that I do not usually pay attention to what surrounds me. It was like the ride of that morning {...}: When you take a moment to see what surrounds you, look at small things, you feel more...

You may not be able to fix everything, {...} but talk helps. There are more people with problems, and understand what it is to be unhappy. Share your problem relieves ...

There are many people who are raised in much more adverse circumstances. Life has these things.

Time only serves to file the pain of loss, but it does not delete it at all.

The world was full of infinite possibilities

Nowadays life spends that everyone goes to hell, that the one who is not pedophile is a thief, and that is not true. We forget that the world is full of common and decent people like you, good...

In my heart I have scars equally thick and ugly as those of the face. I know they are there. But I hope there is some healthy fabric, a small retal through which love can enter and sneak inside....

It is equally unfair to dislike someone for being attractive as having a deformity.

I pity the beautiful people. From the moment they have beauty, they escape from their hands, it is ephemeral. It must be difficult to have to continually demonstrate that you are something else, want...

Did I…did I look like the kind of person to be avoided in a game of bus seat selection?

When people ask me what I do--taxi drivers, hairdressers--I tell them I work in an office.

And the office is largely staffed by shirkers and idiots, Raymond.

I knew that people weren't supposed to exist as I did, work and vodka and sleep in a constant, static cycle in which I spun around on myself, into myself, silent and alone. Going nowhere. On some...

There was no hope, things couldn't be put right. I couldn't be put right. The past could neither be escaped nor undone. After all these weeks of delusion, I recognized, breathless, the pure, brutal...

Mummy told me, years ago, that men go absolutely crazy for sausage rolls. The way to a man's heart, she said, is a homemade sausage roll

Ignis aurum probat. 'Fire tests gold.' The rest of the phrase: '… and adversity tests the brave'.

Before and after the fire. One day I was breakfasting on watermelon, feta and pomegranate seeds, the next I was eating toasted Mother's Pride smeared with margarine. That's the story Mummy told me, at...

I entered the room at the end of the corridor, where, as I correctly found, the kitchen was. This room was also fields of people and noise, but I was able to distinguish marble work surfaces, luminous...

It is incomprehensible to me now that I could ever have thought that anyone would love this ambulant bag of blood and bones.

No matter; I didn't require

I do feel that tube tops are best suited to the under twenty-fives, if, indeed, they are suited to anyone.