P

“And what's a-trouble to you, Jackie?"
"Father," I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in
good humour, "I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother."
He seemed a bit shaken by that, all right, because he said nothing
for quite a while.
"My goodness," he said at last, "that'd be a shocking thing to do.
What put that into your head?"
Father," I said, feeling very sorry for myself, " she's an awful woman.”
― Frank O'Connor, My Oedipus Complex and Other Stories

“We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives - for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control - and then in the central question of what we are to do with our days, with our working lives, we give all that freedom away in return for a pay cheque. And are content to be bored and obedient, resentful and uninvolved and tired. This is such a standard, universally accepted feature of the modern world - that we will dislike and be bored by our work - that we have forgotten to notice that it doesn't make any sense.”
― John Lanchester, Family Romance: A Love Story

“He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don’t do that. Except when we’re pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces.
He grinned. No He didn’t. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you’d better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch.
She laughed. No she didn’t. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.
He smiled.
Not quite true.
All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write.”
― Martin Amis, London Fields

“The phrase "after-life" was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead - a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.”
― Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man