Mayflies Quotes
"Being young is a kind of warfare in which the great enemy is experience."
"Some families are made up of strangers and nothing can change it."
"I didn’t know I wanted approval until Tully gave it to me. I didn’t know life could be like that."
"You’re in charge, Noodles. Do your life your own way."
"He had a tenderness towards weirdos, a kind of therapeutic belief in the value of being extravagantly yourself."
"Each year, the boy who wasn’t expelled and the girl who wasn’t pregnant became joint dux."
"It can take a whole lifetime to know how to thank a person."
"Some people’s lives are about their parents and some aren’t."
"You cannot become a fencer’s office assistant, do you hear me? You’ll die. You’re too strange."
"‘No way, man. Where do you get that lingo? "Quagmire of depravity." Maybe they should hire you to improve this poxy shit.’"
"The egocentric strategies of childhood don’t always go on to become adult traits, but I think we all believed, pretty instinctively, that they would with Hogg."
"‘Jesus,’ Tully said, ‘you’re like a caravan of gypsies with all this crap to drag around.’"
"‘You’re all wrong,’ Hogg said. ‘The best Dalglish goal was against England at Hampden in 1976.’"
"‘It seems obvious,’ he went on, ‘that Brookside speaks to the national mood in terms of the decimation of our communities, and it addresses our latent, vicious attitudes towards women and other vulnerable groups.’"
"‘It’s the Catholic laziness ethic,’ Tibbs said when I questioned him about it. ‘You see it in football quite a lot. We like to get angry but we’re too lazy to fight.’"
"We’re soft as Tunnock’s Teacakes, sentimental as sherbet."
"‘Let’s not talk about it.’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand. ‘He’s fine.’"
"‘I totally love those words,’ he said, ‘and I wish they were mine.’"
"‘I hope we get past the bouncers at the Hacienda,’ Tibbs said. ‘We can’t get a knock-back from the best club in the world. We just can’t.’"
"Not a chance," the fanzine editor said. "Take it from me. Steven Morrissey would never be caught dead in a helicopter. He’s much more likely to arrive on the 101 bus from Wythenshawe."
"It’s there to ward off evil spirits and the television licence people," Frank said.
"That’s teenage love, isn’t it – when the party is less fun because your mate is the party?"
"A tumbler of pee, even in a darkened squat, is like Chekhov’s gun: it must fulfil its promise to the audience."
"Certainly not," said the boy, piecing his fragility back together. "The gum in cigarette papers is made from animal fat and that’s despicable."
"We can grasp the moment and drink a glass of champagne together."
"My name is Norman Bates, I'm just a normal guy."
"That's what it's all about. War and Peace tells us many small things and one big one, that war is a catastrophe."
"It's been my good fortune to share a story with him, and that's all we'll ever have. There's no more. Earth is all the heaven we'll ever know."
"You're totally wrong about that. After all this, we'll see him again."
"He had a better life than I expected. I just have to control the end, and that might be hard."
"Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing, but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enamelling to keep a drowsy Emperor awake; or set upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, or passing, or to come."
"We are all just one observation away from damnation."
"Every honest man and woman is a juvenile, too, and the old humour is always at your elbow."
"It used to be so natural, dancing. Because the music defined you and the heart was in step."
"Speaking on the phone that night, my friend Krisztina said she was finding it harder and harder to write anything that wasn’t true."
"It’s a shame Iona couldn’t make it, she’s gutted."
"Punk was right about everything, about society, I mean. And about people. We are poor slaves in a constant state of co-exploitation."
"Laughter is the obvious policy in a time of strife."
"We all die. But the facts don’t matter – we can’t bear to lose the people we love."
"You are a human being. And that’s an unstable condition that ends badly for all of us."
"The past isn’t really the past. It’s just music, books, and films."
"No, it’s that other thing beginning with ‘m’ – mercy."
"We could all live side by side, like in Brookside Close."
"It’s like an explosion of life happening and then it’s gone."
"Everyone has a person like Tully. The thing we know is that humanity has a hundred per cent mortality rate."
"That’s what they say. But Byron’s not the reason. The reason we have this wine from 1990 is because that’s the year Margaret Thatcher was deposed."
"Once you put it like that, there is no other choice."
"He wants to go with grace and I want him to have that choice."
"Nobody has to be right, Jimmy. Nobody has to win. You’ve tried your best and so have I. And we’re here, that’s all."
"These are not the most expensive," he said, "but they are the best."
"Everything is personal. I just wish he’d spelled it out to her."
"Men have a way of writing themselves into each other’s experience and placing it away from the women they love."
"Some people live to be ninety," Iona said, "but they never know such things. It’s no comfort right now, but he really lived."
"This is for Tully," she texted. "We’ve been through everything together and I’m not going to let him down."
"The choice is not ours to make. The book is the book. And the people who write these things wish to keep the essence alive."