Quotes from Liz Jensen

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

Men let women down. Over and over again. I'ts what they're programmed to do.

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.

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.

Carpe Dium, I say. Seize the day. Grab it by the throat and rattle its bollocks

I've thought a lot about hope and come to the conclusion that either it's there or it isn't. No in between. You

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.

The French term un acte manqué describes a form of self-sabotage whereby the unconscious sets about wrecking – for whatever reason – what the conscious has built.

Outside, the moon is a thin, luminous scrape and the stars throb weakly above the sea.

In my sleepwalking years, I learned the existence of another dimension. I do not inhabit it any longer. But somehow, it continues to inhabit me.

Everyone becomes a believer in a crisis, calling on a God with whom to cut a last-ditch deal. She'd

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.

But weirdness is relative in the territory occupied by the mentally deranged.

It's a ground floor apartment in the old part of Hadport. I don't see much of Mrs. Zarnac, who lives upstairs. Lonely-looking older men visit her, And when she cooks for them vinegar smells waft down. Crosses my mind he might be pickling them alive, one after another, for some dark embalming project.

Watching TV puts your own hell into a different perspective, if that's what you want. Today I do.

I'm remembering there's a word in Russian, izgoy, that describes someone with a flaw that makes that person singularly unfit to perform his or her professional role. A blocked writer, I lascivious priest, a drunken chauffeur. As a screwed-up therapist,someone like me should not be working at all. Not yet. It is far too soon. And you can tell that. Bethany, with her Competence Scale, already has. But here I am. An izgoy.

There's this expectation that we should all be sexual beings, but the fact is, not all of us are, particularly.

None of us got it right. The message was written in letters too big to read, letters that could only be deciphered from a vast distance or an unusual angle. We were as good as blind. This, by the way, is a figurative expression. Unlike many on the spectrum, I can deploy those.

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.