“The day was ridiculous.In fact, the situation was so serious I thought they had to be joking - like maybe they staged a special first day to psych people out. I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths." It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”
“I had one class in the morning, the mysteriously named "Further Maths". It was two hours long and so deeply frightening that I think I went into a trance.”
“After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.”
“The essay I had to read was called, "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope.The first challenge was that the essay was, in fact, a very long poem in "heroic couplets". If something is called an essay, it should be an essay.”
“I had always assumed the weekend was a holy tradition, respected by good people everywhere. Not so at Wexford.”
“Rory: "People are being serious."Jazza: "There's a serial killer out there. Of course people are being serious."Rory: "Yeah, but what are the chances?"Jazza: "I bet all of the victims thought that."Rory: "But still, what are the chances?"Jazza: "Well, I imagine they are several million to one."Jerome: "Not that high. You're only dealing with a small part of London. And while there might be a million or more people in that area, the Ripper is probably focusing on women, because all of the original victims were women. So halve that--"Jazza: "You really need another hobby.”
“Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him.”