How Not To Be A Boy Quotes
"Some of the best tunes were missing, but I guessed that was to keep them as a surprise."
"The bedroom walls are pale green: pock-marked with Blu-Tack scars from sci-fi posters now replaced with Van Gogh prints."
"The sketches this time include ‘The Price is Slight’ (TV game-show parody), ‘Glue Peter’ (children’s TV show parody), ‘The GAY-Team’ (parody of children’s TV action drama, also apparently watched by American adults)."
"I can’t be sure if the recording quality of a boy singing in his bedroom over the instrumental version of a single played through a 1960s gramophone into the tiny external microphone of a cheap tape recorder and then eventually played through the speakers of a cuboid school hall is going to be – pristine."
"Despite all the practice, this is the first time I’ve done it from start to finish without stopping."
"I haven’t got the first clue what I’m doing."
"‘Quiet boy’, ‘painfully shy’, ‘you never know he’s there’: these are some of the phrases I catch grown-ups using when they talk about me."
"I promise it won’t fall off. I swear on the grave of my dead mother that it won’t fall off."
"I don’t want no seven stone weakling / Or a boy who thinks he’s a girl . . ."
"Hell hath no fury like an angry son with a book deal."
"It’s a hard world and what you do with pain – if you’re a man like Paul – is shrug it off."
"One way of imagining life is that it’s a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one."
"If something terrible happens to you, and you’re lucky enough to have supportive friends, there will be a period when you hear a version of this several times a week: ‘And if you need to talk, I’m right here. I mean, just talk. Because I’m here. For a talk. And if you don’t want to talk, maybe think about talking. Talk.’"
"What are we saying to a boy when we tell him to ‘man up’ or to ‘act like a man’? At its most benign, we might just be saying: do the thing that needs doing even if you don’t want to do it."
"It sounds like this: ‘Pain, guilt, grief, fear, anxiety: these are not appropriate emotions for a boy because they will be unacceptable emotions for a man.'"
"The great thing about refusing to feel feelings is that, once you’ve denied them, you don’t have to take responsibility for them. Your feelings will be someone else’s problem."
"Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?"
"The thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football."
"And when it comes to colossal strokes of good fortune, it starts here – it starts with having a family who loves you and someone who inspires you to read."
"To involve yourself in a story is to imagine what it’s like to be someone else."
"Thing number one: you should do your best to notice luck so that you don’t accidentally take credit for it."
"I don’t mean that the condition of being male is some innately fallen state. I mean that being male is terrific but comes with a load of extra baggage that is worth noticing."
"Boys gave bravery a bad name, I thought. They wanted it for stupid stuff like swimming and wasps, nettles and fighting."
"Some men don’t recover from masculinity at all."
"Childhood friendships often begin with convenience – the same classroom, the same street – but then, if you’re lucky, the best of them evolve into something that feels an awful lot like love."
"Boys do Pals, we don’t do Love. But the attachment was strong enough for the feelings of separation to be familiar to anyone who has ever caught a whiff of a love affair on the turn."
"And by the time things become bloody typical in a relationship, you either work hard to fix it or you accept it’s time to move on."
"Taking something to pieces doesn’t spoil the whole when you put it back together. You can still love the effortlessness even when you’ve noticed the effort."
"Is there any romance greater than the one a teenage boy has with his own loneliness?"
"It's all just a painful march towards death so why prolong it and all that stopped me was what it would do to everyone else."
"I'm never going to see her again and everything is pressure."
"Grief has to talk to normality, normality has to talk to grief, and they both have to listen. It’s an ongoing peace deal, a two-state solution."
"Life without her is unthinkable. Literally unthinkable."
"You can get away with some amazingly bad behaviour, as long as your predecessors were complete shits."
"You don’t choose your first love. I was lucky with Will."
"The best I can do is coexist with it. Grief has to talk to normality, normality has to talk to grief, and they both have to listen."
"This moment, a happy one, will vanish. But it will be there to be recreated another time, any time – just as I daily reconstruct the sound of my mother's voice."
"I marvel that something so present will soon become real only in memory."
"You live and learn. At any rate, you live." - Douglas Adams
"This place was a tomb and not even a quiet one."
"Unlike the bike crash, they were so completely swervable if I’d done some work."
"What I partly miss about having a mum is the teenager’s God-given right to refuse her help."
"It’s always difficult to tell with a man with a beard, but I’m pretty sure I’ve just ruined his week."
"‘It’s nothing that I’ve done wrong, is it?’ I give an involuntary yelp of laughter, but try to turn it into a ‘the very idea!’ kind of chuckle."
"But instead of sawing my own head off, I check the post. ‘It is with great pleasure . . .’"
"I didn’t give Darth much of a battle. This will be different. I can stop worrying about how to be a boy. I can stop showing off about how not to be a boy. I’ll just be myself."
"So I don’t say anything. At school, the novelty value of having me around has worn off and the sixth form seem to have concluded that I’m a freak and a weirdo."
"All ten parents are seemingly all still married."
"I think you use those experiences as a model for current adversity and that makes things feel considerably worse than they might do otherwise. I think you've got a problem. And I think we can help."
"We are not responsible for our thoughts, of course. We’re responsible only for our words and actions."
"To listen to Fay talk about manufactured fags you’d think rolling tobacco was some kind of health food."
"Men in trouble are often in trouble precisely because they are trying to Get a Grip and Act Like a Man."
"We are at risk of suicide because the alternative is to ask for help, something we have been repeatedly told is unmanly."
"You don’t think it’s possible that Patrick or Joe miss their friends from school, for example? Because it doesn’t sound like that actually crossed your mind."
"I think we can both agree that your behaviour has been deplorable and it goes without saying that I don’t want to go out with you any more. If you want us to remain friends, then I think you need to get used to the idea that other people are real."
"The mark of a real man is being able to tolerate a chest infection for three months before laying off the smokes or asking for medicine."
"I’m sorry to tell you that this bestiality banter goes on for about another minute."
"I was afraid that I was in the wrong place, afraid of losing my old friends, anxious that my new ones didn’t love me and, as usual, in grief."
"It only took me about ten years to stop fantasising about the smart replies and witty comebacks I could have come out with that afternoon."
"You appear to have structured your life in such a way as to bring shame upon your college."
"Sometimes, physically, two people just click, don't they?"
"The judgement-free listening is the main value of it."
"It's probably worth saying that Clara was funny and charming and had the kind of face I could happily spend a couple of days just staring at."
"Suddenly, I had to go on tour with Footlights. Bollocks."
"I wish Dr Satan Jizzcake a long and happy retirement."
"Talking – at some length – about my feelings."
"How could I possibly take up any more of this man’s time when literally no one in the universe had ever been so lucky or so blessed as me?"
"A young man may call himself a feminist, but to do so is hardly a test of character."
"Yes, it occurs to me that this is a wretched business and an appalling waste."
"The feeling is: ‘I used to be good at this stuff and now I’m an official mediocrity.’"
"Presently he says to me, ‘I know you’d rather your mum was here, son, but for what it’s worth I’m very proud of you.’"
"Ambition is free – this is no time to put limits on it."
"I’ve had some pretty cool days at the office too. I just thought they were cool for the wrong reasons."
"Considering we’re completely lost and I’ve no idea what to do next, this is all going quite well."
"What have I been doing in London these last nineteen years?"
"I don’t just get lost when walking or driving – I get lost on trains."
"Feminism is not about men versus women; it’s about men and women versus The Trick."
"Books take ages and the first draft of this chapter was written in the spring of 2016."
"The idea that boys and girls, men and women, have different roles to play in life according to the different contributions they make to a shared reproductive system is one they are going to have to deal with whether we like it or not."
"Shall I tell them that they’re laughing because of The Trick that makes boys unhappy and girls get rubbish jobs?"
"Her reaction to me in general is evenly divided between thinking I’m an idiot, and thinking I’m an idiot that she might want to shag."
"What, after all, is the problem? Well, I think to myself, I’ve just turned thirty, and Jenna is about to turn thirty, so she’s probably worrying about children."
"Ultimately, we’re not talking about much sex with many people. But I was right to treat it as a big deal generally, just as I was wrong to think that Dad would have some kind of fit about me individually."
"This is the thing about villages: sooner or later, everyone knows everything about everyone else."
"For twenty-five years I’ve been made to feel welcome in Woodhall Spa Conservative Club: drinking there and playing snooker with Dad, Mark, Andrew and their friends."
"It’s recognition that community is more important than politics, even as the best political disagreements are often about how best to maintain a community."
"The promise I’d made was to be a 50/50 husband and father."
"I look at my CV over those years and there’s persuasive evidence of breadwinning panic."
"Well now, dear reader. I think it’s about time we had a look at the place I’ve so far managed to avoid, the place where we find this particular Webb, to put it mildly, not at his best."
"All this time, The Trick had been lying in wait."
"The sadness that we feel now, we can afford to hold close; safe as we are in the knowledge that grief is love’s echo."
"Men will struggle to treat women as equals if we haven’t learned to look after ourselves; to recognise our feelings and take responsibility for our actions."
"Self-respect and kindness to others: that’s it. That’s how we restore freedom to the galaxy."