Quotes from Leone Ross

Generally, men told stories to boast, but women were different. They wanted to look at their words in the air and extract the meaning, and if you shut up and listened, they'd tell you very interesting things indeed.

Don't trust anyone who keep telling you what's wrong with you,

He sought out cold waterfalls, small thick forests, and thought about nothing at all.

There was something quite correct and right about a man so sad he made bad decisions.

Compassion was a kind of magic; listening was at least half the task.

Today I feel like a bride. Fragrant. I am every love song ever played. I am pink confetti. I am the wedding march personified. I am God's best promise, an open sack, waiting to be filled with matrimonially blessed seed. I am hope.

Boxes of fireworks - she remembered them filling her childhood, at every occasion she could think of, gods, where had the Popisho fireworks gone? Mad swirls of silver-blue lightning and crimson stars. A whole sky of melting yellow moons that trickled into their hair and faces and turned into caramel.

He could hear the exact moment an argument frayed, when it became about feelings, still pretending to be facts.

All the time she had been grasping the air with her hands, in an impassioned effort to express herself. 'Here was not just food, but an experience. It was all of Popisho, the smells and textures, it was - it was - all our love and our losses and our beauty, struggles, history, our childhoods ... it was perfect, it was perfect for me.

She can't remember the last time she spoke to a man who was listening.

It took less than three generations of children online to wipe out the part of the brain that's hard-wired for awe.

Butterflies were like alcohol. The heat of a good wine in a burnt orange butterfly. The cool swallow of rare ship-bought vodka in clear, white and blue beauties.

Touch me, he thought, and all he could think was: love me, and all he could think was: why I never prepare for this moment better? Look how I had all these years of life to ready myself for your arrival, and what I did with them? Wasted them on other women, and other ideas, and now you here, I not ready. He wanted to sit in front of her and have her tell him everything she'd ever experienced in all of her life.

If a man want cook, he hire one, nah? Or do it himself, if he have a mind.

He had needed someone to see him, to understand; to astonish him, like the concert.

Hell: a personalised service.

When I was fifteen, I met a young man with a mantra. His mother taught it to him: 'There is only one way to handle women. Fool them, fuck them and forget them.

The world was stirring awake again, and he had a list of things to do today in his green notebook. Fish delivery Fuckery

Mindfulness was a buzz-word in 2012 – took on steam by the time I was born. Mum said it was our last attempt to claim an emotional landscape before the undeniable march of apathy, the lack of any profound connection, the dullness.