Strong Female Character Quotes
"I’ll study so much it’ll shock you, dickhead."
"You ever noticed when a guy comes over to a table of girls, the girls stop being funny and start laughing at everything the guy is saying instead?"
"People loved her because she was funny and had an ability to roast teachers with the comic timing of an old pro."
"I don’t move with a sexy arrogance. Like most autistics, I have coordination and gait problems that lead to me kicking drinks across the carpet every day and tripping over my own feet while out walking."
"The way I saw it, if I hadn’t have done that she would have attacked me first."
"I didn’t understand that my body overreacts due to my amygdala being too large and so I must mentally talk down a disproportionate fight-or-flight response."
"I knew from the novels I read that being the best at school was key to escaping my house and leaving Bathgate altogether."
"I’ve discovered that one of the most hurtful aspects of crossed wires in a lifetime of dealing with allistic people is that they tend to look for and assume there’s an unspoken agenda in your behaviour."
"I wasn’t sure what exactly I had taken away from them by doing what I wanted."
"I guess if I enjoyed sex and didn’t feel there were any consequences, I was robbing them of the idea that chastity was vital for social approval and a way of being held in high esteem."
"My inability to read between the lines or lie led to me being fined £200."
"I still don’t know if that was a good thing."
"Trying to make people like you was an impossible code I would never crack."
"I wasn’t sure what I was crying about but it seemed safest just to mirror him until I could work out what to do next."
"I didn’t yet know how bad it was going to be."
"I felt like the doctors and the general public need to raise awareness of how embarrassing most suicide attempts are."
"In a strip club, groups of men are in a safe space where they’re encouraged to play up to hypermasculine ideals."
"You have to understand, with a lot of these people, they’re projecting their own feelings of shame onto you."
"But you needed at least one good friend so you had someone to rub fake tan on your back."
"This job is my one bit of relief from my maths course and you bitch and complain and bitch and complain."
"The crowd laughed, the laughter indicating that, ‘Yes, we all agree strippers are stupid.’"
"I have no recollection of whether I took off all my street clothes during the lap dance."
"The appointments were less than useless as the psychiatrist was there to medicate a normal response to the trauma of being violently attacked."
"I can’t wrap my head round how anyone could be stripping to relax."
"There’s no HR in strip clubs so you can be mentally ill for a long time before it becomes a problem."
"As I sawed at my arm like it was a stale loaf, I reflected on how self-harming was already so embarrassing that if you were gonna do it you should at least have the right tools."
"I can’t remember who got in touch with who first."
"I realized later that this discomfort came from the fact I wasn’t performing the role of victim correctly."
"I burst into tears with frustration during one meeting as I’d started to realize they wanted some emotional response I didn’t have."
"I was terrified of going to sleep so decided it was best to avoid it."
"I’m never going to say it’s empowering; I put paid to that idea after I had to bicker with a girl over which of us got to dress as a sexy schoolgirl on costume night."
"There’s no big reveal down the line, where Jim is actually a rapist or a bad bastard."
"I realized then that actually, love is dropping water into someone’s gross deathbed mouth."
"I think if we all called it ‘starving and dehydrating someone to death’ a lot more of us would become pro-euthanasia overnight."
"If you’ve ever started school midway through the school year or been the new person at work and felt lost – it’s that feeling. Except you never just pick up on stuff or fall in line eventually; it’s a constant sense that everyone is in a WhatsApp group you don’t know about."
"I remembered what Jeanette Winterson said that day at the Book Festival: ‘You just had to work bloody hard.’"
"‘This is me,’ I said to one of the customers, pointing to my photo in the paper. ‘I’m a writer outside of here.’"
"I’m aware that this process was called the Liverpool Care Pathway by the NHS but for reasons outlined elsewhere in this book, I don’t do well with obfuscating language."
"We’re like swans. We’re paddling away frantically under the water but on the surface we’re serene."
"The autistic comedian Hannah Gadsby pointed out that there aren’t many autism-friendly openings for women."
"I had a meltdown’ means something completely different for neurotypical people."
"I’m an autistic person now and not in another time where I’d have been institutionalized or trialled as a witch."