Emma Jane Unsworth > Quotes

“Big cities comforted me: the cover, the chaos, the hollow sympathy of the architecture, the Tube lines snaking underground. London could swallow you up, in a good way. There were times when I'd been broken and being subsumed into a city had made me feel part of a whole again.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“Children aren’t supposed to like dark chocolate. It’s one of those bitter things that you are meant to acquire a taste for later in life, like olives and self-pity.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Hungry the Stars and Everything

“These things you treasure, how often they're somebody else's trash.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“Where were my allies? My sad captains? Those moonsick girls I drank with over long winters behind the bowling alley, driven there in cars we didn't know. Those times when we were all strangers and everything was so far away but all we needed to do was run towards it. I had not grown much. I had not reached anywhere. I was still running. When I wasn't lying down.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“Sometimes I think about how many therapists in the world know about me and I feel sick with fame.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“So let me get this straight,” she says, “You’re upset because someone you don’t know might not like a version of you that doesn’t really exist.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“It's the worst yet. I'm in TEFL City.'

'TEFL City' because we called those times 'TEFL-pondering mornings', when your only option felt like emigration and teaching.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“Some fresh air, some perspective. You wonder why you’re anxious when you constantly stare at a device that beams nightmares into your eyes.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“Inside me, a chorus line of devils in tutus did a fast little cancan.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“The 90s were beautiful, though. The freedom. We memorised phone numbers. We memorised directions. No one knew what we looked like. No one knew our reasons. No one could reach us. We were gods – and we didn’t know it.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“That’s what the mid-thirties should be about, after all: constant self-interrogation. Acquiring the courage to change what you can, and the therapist to accept what you can’t. What”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“In the quantum multiverse all eventualities are possible. Which means, paradoxically, that all eventualities are inevitable. They have also quite possibly already happened. Make of that what you will, not that your will has much to do with it. Because here's the thing. If you believe that consciousness is an accumulation of memory; if you believe that you often know what's going to occur either through some animal instict or a human subscription to fate, then you are a walking and talking embodiment of everything happening all at once.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth

“Boomer parents told their X-er and millennial daughters they could do it all, but they forgot to tell their sons to pull their weight as fathers. So you have all these burnt-out women. Fucked. Furious at their husbands. And their husbands have no idea why. They’re fucking outraged, too. They weren’t prepared for this. And THAT is why I have these fucking haemorrhoids.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Full stop or no full stop? A full stop always looks decisive and commanding, but it can also look more cool and casual if you just leave the sentence hanging there, like, Oh I'm so busy in my dazzling life I don't even have time to punctuate. The squalid truth is I over-punctuate when I'm stressed/excited.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“The night is a zoo and the next day is its museum”
― Emma Jane Unsworth

“Got kids?’ Now Sarah had dealt with this frankly fucking insanely impolite question in various ways. I had a miscarriage this morning. I suffered early menopause. I have cancer of the womb. I had a baby once but I killed it, and prison was super boring – so I won’t be doing THAT again! Anything to shame them into considering their words and realising that this is a very personal, potentially pain-triggering question that you should under no circumstances ask a stranger.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Mostly though, I just want to not care what every single person thinks of me all the time. And I want to not have so many people’s opinions whirring around my brain and I want to share my life with someone and not get bored. And I’m so scared that isn’t possible because that is a lot of boxes to empty and sort. And sometimes I just want to have a shower and put on a clean pair of jeans and eat a sandwich in a cafe and feel like a normal fucking person.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“I’m anxious to please her because I’m an approval junkie and have a teacher–pupil dynamic with people in positions of authority.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“She talked about how she’d overcome the problem like you might in a job interview or an application. It was a pitch. She presented a shiny, complete story. Look what I made! She left no space for anyone to help her. This was why she couldn’t be vulnerable. Her patriarchal view of strength and success meant no one got a look-in. Even now, on the path to enlightenment, the thought of sitting with someone in her own emotional mess made Sarah cringe.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“We’re comforting ourselves, aren’t we, you and I? We’re living in repeats and circles because they’re reassuring that there’ll be no surprises. No more hurt.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“She didn't just change the temperature of rooms, she changed their entire chemical make-up so that anyone in the room would only be aware that the room was an extension of her and she was the thrumming nucleus.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like a kid,” Sony replies. “Because the planet is dying and someone needs to take responsibility.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“Your imagination is filling in the gaps and joining up dots to create the wrong picture. You were always too good at that.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“You’re wasting time caring about all this superficial shit while the world goes to hell in a handcart. Babies are in cages on the Mexican boarder, someone I went to school with just set up a food bank in my hometown.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“Oh, my darling," she says, into my hair. "At least I only had to try to look like Twiggy. You've got to sing and dance and fuck and work and mother and sparkle and equalize and not complain and be beautiful and love your imperfections and stay strong and show your vulnerability and bake and box and pull fucking port. It's much too much.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“You're fifteen, aren't you?
Yeah, so I know what I'm talking about.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“All those exhibitions I smiled through. All those parties I hosted. All those dinners I presented. All that I was, I was not. I was a lie. The antisocial party girl.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults

“When the end comes you know it's real because it isnt remotely cinematic.”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Animals

“Alfa Romeo (a fuckboy car if ever she saw one;”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Slags

“Quando você está em um relacionamento com um homem branco, basicamente administra um reformatório todo santo dia, companheira. - Kelly”
― Emma Jane Unsworth, Adults