Liz Jensen > Quotes

“Everyone said that one day I was going to have a big accident, an accident to end all accidents. One day you might look up and see a kid falling from the sky. That would be me.”
― Liz Jensen, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

“Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones that ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“The thought of losing him again kills me. This is of course a figure of speech, I will remain alive, but I will not know happiness.”
― Liz Jensen, The Uninvited

“—To some extent. Men want to think the best of women, especially if they’re attractive. Isn’t there some truth in that? That we attribute moral goodness to attractive people? And to those who present themselves as victims? Natalie”
― Liz Jensen, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

“Men let women down. Over and over again. I'ts what they're programmed to do.”
― Liz Jensen

“A mixture of feelings- love, distaste, revulsion, pity- rose in my throat…There was an eternity to that moment, that see-sawing split- second when adoration clung and then lurched, spilling into chaos, rage, hate, anger: the desire to smash and embrace, love and destroy. Betrayal does that…Shows you how worthless love is, when its object is indifferent, ruthless, no more than a machine for surviving.”
― Liz Jensen, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

“You plant a seed thinking it's love. It's only when the thing starts putting down roots that you realise it's not growing the way it should. But by then it's too late. It has sprouted foliage, blossomed and borne demented fruit.
What do you do with the sickness in you?”
― Liz Jensen, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

“The mind is infinitely larger than the world it inhabits. There is more to the human brain than machinery or meat. I believe in the soul, I thought suddenly. Everything I know about the brain tells me not to, but I believe in it still.”
― Liz Jensen, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

“But weirdness is relative in the territory occupied by the mentally deranged.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Lord, What a terrible shame. You're so attractive!'
I know, I want to tell her. It should have happened to someone really ugly. And then it wouldn't have mattered.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“There’s a man with her. He’s blonde, balding, harassed-looking, and probably what they call time-poor. Older. He looks at me over the steering wheel and gives a helpless, frustrated gesture, as though I should be able to identify and sympathize with his plight. Then, as the woman starts to open the car door, he stops her with a swift movement. And suddenly they’re struggling, locked into a graceless, desperate tussle. I picture the dull, bestial unhappiness of a couple shackled to each other by their mortgage and their children’s shareed DNA.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“There’s this expectation that we should all be sexual beings, but the fact is, not all of us are, particularly.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Carpe Dium, I say. Seize the day. Grab it by the throat and rattle its bollocks”
― Liz Jensen, Ark Baby

“People are always glad when you address them in their own language, I have found, even though your knowledge may not extend further than what you have memorised from a dictionary or phrase book.”
― Liz Jensen, The Uninvited

“Good fried, what other ‘claim to fame’ did anyone in this family have, apart from the fact that they had licked aristocratic arses down the generations, with no sense of shame, & had chronic delusions of grandeur? None, that I could see!”
― Liz Jensen, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

“The era you have come to is called the Information Age. You will have access to all the knowledge in the world, but never, I’ll wager, will you have met folk with less wisdom, curiosity or insight.”
― Liz Jensen, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

“Watching TV puts your own hell into a different perspective, if that’s what you want. Today I do.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallize moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like - for me - the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase - “ca va tourner au vinaigre “ - used by my mother, bitterly, to someone on the phone, or the pop of the dog fleas Pierre and I picked from our terrier and flicked onto the barbecue, or the appalling intimacy of my first kiss, or the body blow of my mother’s death, or the chaos of Pierre’s wedding, or the aching realization that dawned when my father said “Mesopotamia” instead of “kitchen”, or the night I shouted at Alex and he swerved, or the morning the doctors gave me the final assessment of my paraplegia and, for want of anything better to do, I glanced at the clock and noted that it was 11:23.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Good grief, what other ‘claim to fame’ did anyone in this family have, apart from the fact that they had licked aristocratic arses down the generations, with no sense of shame, & had chronic delusions of grandeur? None, that I could see!”
― Liz Jensen, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

“The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized garbage cans, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence a vista that twangs a country and western chord of self-pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex - Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel - next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting Into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Postpartum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting Daily Telegraph Crossword. But I stopped myself. Why give myself a daily reminder of what I have in every other way laid to rest? Besides, there would be curiosity from colleagues, and my responses to their questions would seem either morbid or tasteless or brutal depending on the pitch and role of my mood. Memories of my past existence, and the future that came with it, can start as benign, Vaselined nostalgia vignettes. But they’ll quickly ghost train into Malevolent noir shorts backlit by that great worst enemy of all victims of circumstance, hindsight. So for the sake of my own sanity, I apologize silently to Alex before burying him in the desk alongside my emergency bottle of Lauphroaig and a little homemade flower press given to me by a former patient who hanged himself with a clothesline.
The happy drawer.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Outside, the moon is a thin, luminous scrape and the stars throb weakly above the sea.”
― Liz Jensen, The Uninvited

“Everyone becomes a believer in a crisis, calling on a God with whom to cut a last-ditch deal. She’d”
― Liz Jensen, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

“Forget about the other girls’ ambitions, Bethany, whatever you think they are. What do you want? “
She stops, and together we look at the wall of red creeper. “If I had a baby I call it Felix. That means happy, right? It would be kind of an ironic name.” I wait for more, thinking: The name I always had in mind was Max. “But I won’t be having a baby.” Me neither. They said I nearly died, there was “no way of saving anything.” Anything: an interesting euphemism. No Max. Not now, not ever.
“But how can you know you’ll never have children? “
“What’s the point, when the world’s fucked? I’d have to be a sadist.” Haresh Modak and the Planetarians would agree with her. They’re singing from the same hymn sheet.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“I think we make a big mistake about ghosts,’ he said suddenly. ‘We think they are from the past. We think they are all dead. But they are alive. And some of them are not even born yet. They are travellers.’ ‘Travellers?”
― Liz Jensen, The Uninvited

“If she’d once possessed a decent physiognomy, then only the sad ruins of it remained.”
― Liz jensen, My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

“There is “colossal arrogance“, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last forever. If one looks at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meager history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on earth has lasted the blink of an eye. “We are the agents of our own destruction - and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see, if not it’s disappearance, then its extreme marginalization./ for the first time in human history, the destruction - already apparent – is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them. “
Although more conservative and measured than the planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Meanwhile in Iran and Israel the violence is an open wound on TV, so predictable and it’s bloodiness of the mutilated children and howling women become a spectacle you shatter it briefly before zapping over to some Japanese game show. The well-meaning optimism of those Entertainement programs, with their perky nerdiness and banana-skin tomfoolery, provides a counterpoint to the real world grief. Their crude hilarities flit through my head while I swim my laps, like my Spanish Kahlo mantra or fragments of some absurd erotic fantasy, poignantly irrelevant.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Will it take the rest of my life to process what has happened? I don't know.

If Freddy were here, he would say, 'Yet', as per the rules of a playful accord we have concerning unacquired knowledge, whereby if one of us said they didn't know something, the other had to say 'Yet'. And then the other one--usually me--would provide the missing information, or we'd look it up, or just speculate.”
― Liz Jensen, The Uninvited

“There are moments in life – so few you can count them – when time's perspective seems to shift quite literally. In those moments, a second can last a minute, or freeze to near-eternity. Soldiers know this. But homes can be war zones too.”
― Liz Jensen, The Uninvited

“You and Meera didn’t have children. I imagine that was a private response.”
“Why create hostages to a future whose shape one could so clearly see? The decision was to avoid grief. For oneself but also for others. “ from habit, I note detailing use of “one “instead of “I “or “we “and store the observation. “The world is too full. But the childless are always punished. It’s a great irony that one gets called selfish for making what is essentially the altruistic choice.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture