Emma Forrest

“Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.”

“I envied women with signature hair-dos, signature perfumes, signature sign-offs. Novelists who tell Vogue Magazine: “I can’t live without my Smythson notebook, Pomegranate Noir cologne by Jo Malone and Frette sheets”. In the grip of madness, materialism begins to look like an admirable belief system.”

“We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.”

“At the exit, they sell home-made soap with the evil eye attached, to protect yourself from people who'd wish you ill. I buy one, wondering, How do you hang it inside yourself?”

“You’re like Marilyn Monroe,’ Ken tells me, which I take as a compliment and say a nervous “Thank You”. Interrupting, he adds, ‘You’re all velvet and Velcro. Men want you because you’re sexy and broken and when it gets too rough they can say “Hey! This toy is broken!” and toss you aside without feeling bad.”

“Are you mine?”Yes.“Are you mine?”Yes.“Are you mine?”No.“No?”No. I loved being yours. But now I’m mine, which is all I ever was, in the end.”

“In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.”

“He says he thanks every star the we existed on the same clestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man made throughaway for intersecting dreams.”

“Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.”

“I win, and we discover that when men peer into a car that is blasting "True Faith" on the outskirts of San Franscisco, they are disappointed to see three women.”

“Time heals all wounds. And if it doesn't, you name them something other than wounds and agree to let them stay.”

“He was only twenty-five.He was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss-the one that is happening as you feel it.”

“My thoughts are messy, my emotions are messy, my body goes in and out at will. The raised white scars on my arms and legs are the only aspect of my being that comes close to minimalism. They came from chaos, but it is hard to carve frustration and unease into the flesh. Only straight lines.”

“[...] at least my face moves when you look at it. At least I know I'm a fool.”

“I don't want to go to university. I don't like unity and I hate verses. I just love the choruses of songs. ”

“When I come home from school, I take my Doc Martens off and put on fake satin mules with the marabou trim, slip into my dressing gown and my movie, and I feel serene. I hold a glass of Coke to my cheek and pretend it is a glass of bourbon and I am in New Orleans. My bedroom door is the doorway onto the street and at night I can't sleep because of the heat and the commotion in this town. So I go down to the river and dance as a man with scars on his face plays an accordion. People clap along and wolf-whistle and I whip my skirt around my thighs, which are long and lean because I barely get a chance to eat, what with all my bourbon and afternoon baths. I dance until my mules get muddy, then I tiptoe home, followed by sailors and men who have hundreds and thousands of dollars playing stud poker. Steve McQueen might be there. I can't remember. I get confused at this point. Too much drink. I'm sure Karl Malden is lurking in the background, gazing at me longingly. I am kind to him because his mother is dying. ”

“This boy has negative charisma. He walks into a room and the oxygen starts to evaporate. I guess that's why girls sleep with him. They find his awfulness transfixing. He's like a lousy 1970's disaster movie that they can't bring themselves to turn off, even though it is making their life worse every minute they leave it on. ”

“Funny. The blazer, skirt and tie become automatically sexy the minute you leave school when you're eighteen or nineteen and pull it out for fancy-dress parties. But whilst you're still there, stewing through Math, unable to find anyone who'll let you sit next to them in the cafeteria, crying in the toilet stalls, you know what it represents and you can't bring yourself to make it look alluring. That would be traitorous and phoney. I knew I looked like shit and I was glad I did because that's how the twenty pounds of gray polyester and itchy navy wool made me feel.”

“I thought of him, with his feet in the Chateau Marmont pool and his fork in a carrot cake. He was just a little kid. I was upset at what I had introduced him to, the records and films he didn't already know. I felt like a mother who had left syringes around the room and let her baby get hooked on hard drugs. ”

“Hotel rooms are funny things. They make everything look different. If people have to sleep with each other, sexually or platonically, they should do it in kitchens. The kitchen is the epicenter of truth in any home or building. You could never misconstrue a look or a word or a touch in the icy cool, compartmentalized presence of a fridge. ”

“From the time I met him, he left me little clues of a man, a trail of bread crumbs to a gingerbread cottage. Inside the cottage were peeling pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe that keep sliding to the floor because the walls were too sweet to hold the Blu-Tack. I tried to pick the posters off the floor and got so distracted, I ended up in an oven. So I climbed out of the oven and out of the house and I was saving myself, but it hurt so bad. I found the boy I loved, but he didn't want to hug me because I was blistered and spotted with bread crumbs. I looked up close because, up close, I could always see myself reflected in the surface of his shiny, iconic beauty. But suddenly he had pores, grey hairs, and chapped lips. And I couldn't see a damn thing.”

“He was a super shiny boy and I liked the shape of him. Under the blanket. In the shower. I liked his shadow on the street and his imprint on the sofa. I hated the smell of hair gel on his head, but I loved it on the pillow. I love the smell of losing someone.”

“I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.”

“It's all in her walk, a cartoon swagger. Part Jayne Mansfield, part Muhammad Ali. Men never know if it's an invitation upstairs or an invitation outside. ”

“I think about pasta in the shape of Hello Kitty, stockings with diamond seams up the back, Marilyn's crumbling cake-mascara, and Liz Taylor's new white hair. I haven't got time for the trivials.”

“I don't see what's so good about being genuine. Clog dancing is genuine. Isn't being fake more of an achievement? At least it takes some inspiration. Like, sherbet dips, they're a special food. Think of all the additives and coloring and grinding that it takes to create a sherbet dip. But carrots? They're just out there, shrieking, "Hi, we're some carrots! Love us for it!" They never have to prove themselves.”

“I think that's such a beautiful sentiment. Love should only last as long as a very expensive and impractical bikini that looks stunning, but dissolves in the sea within days. So many pop songs tell of this terrible, tiresome love that they want to last forever. But that just makes me think of long-life milk, acrid and fake. Love should be like a movie trailer. Even if the film's a stinker, you get the best laughs and the biggest explosions in the space of two minutes.”

“I wanted to know how ugly I could get, how ruined and ugly and spoiled, before they stopped trying to fuck me. I didn't think they'd ever notice. Nobody had so far. Because I was still in the shape of a beautiful girl. Although I behaved like an ugly one.”