Quotes from Scarlett Thomas

Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together).

I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.

There's a woman in the bakery who smiles at me as if everyone I've ever known has just died.

Heather cocks her head to one side as if she's trying to make the information roll down a hill in her mind and come to rest in a place she can access it.

My mind now has a celebration party and a funeral going on in the same room.

One rabbit has a label on its are, another one doesn't. You can love the one with the label and everyone accepts that. Risk your life for a real animal and people say you're mad.

It's amazing how many grandparents some children go through. At my last school one wretched child had SEVENTEEN. Another one died every time there was homework due. Think about it, class. SEVENTEEN.

Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or …' I'm drunk, I suddenly realise, so I shut up. But

Života, stejn? jako sn?.

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens.

If life wasn't going to be like a Hollywood film, there was only one option: fuck life and rent the film instead.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

It's only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing; there's a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers [...]

I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower.

It was not my physical being, however, which was descending, but rather my mind. It was as if the thinking, reasoning part of my being was closing with the finality of a heavy, locked door.

There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.

This isn't a ride you can take again, but one, I'm guessing, that is simply impossible to get off.

Can it be that you don't want to go strolling with your friend in the daytime under cherry trees just coming into bloom, and in the evening listen to Schubert's music? Can it be that you won't like writing with a goose

Popular science can say some pretty wild things these days, but the supernatural is still out, as is Lamarck. You can have as many dimensions as you want, as long as none of them contains ghosts, telepathy, anything that fucks with Charles Darwin, or anything that Hitler liked (apart from Charles Darwin).

The clue's always, always, buried deep in the boredom... Where do you feel most bored? Go there.

If you discovered that you were the only person in the world, and everything you see around you was in fact a part of you, dramatised, how would that change what you are doing right now, right this very instant? What would you stop doing? What would you start doing? What would suddenly not matter at all?

Now dare to be tragic, for you will be redeemed.' Friedrich Nietzsche                        Ah!

Because of capitalism, Lissa. Because of your fathers and what they do." "Sir, that's sexist! Some of our mothers might be capitalists too.

maybe moths don't think lightbulbs are the moon. Maybe they found out how far away the moon is, and simply chose suicide instead of failure. Wouldn't you?