You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending timewith, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who couldnot possibly appeal to anybody else at all.
Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up.
When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction.
When they – I cannot bring myself to use the first-person plural in this instance.
When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are e...
When I'm arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I'm going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. This is *really* who I am, I'll tell him.
When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern po...
Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girl...
She was the spare room that never got tidied, the e-mail that never got answered, the loan that never got repaid, the symptom that never got described to a doctor.
Noi che viviamo in questo quartiere e con questo reddito crediamo molto al potere delle parole: leggiamo, parliamo, scriviamo, abbiamo terapisti e consulenti e persino sacerdoti che sono felici di sta...
Nobody worries about kids listeningto thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery andloss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are t...
Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwor...
Most of this fixation was easy to explain. Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal haven’t really had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of...
It's not like anyone said anything that's memorable, or wise, or acute; it's more a mood thing. For the first time in my life I felt as though I'm in an episode of thirtysomethibng rather than an epis...
It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself
It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.
It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.
It had never occurred to Sophie that she would be forgiven so readily for her trespasses and she wasn’t sure that she liked it. She had refused to visit her dangerously ill father in hospital because...
Is there a reason for the sudden fashion for the eight-goal tie? Maybe it’s because defending is hard, and boring, and thankless, and most people who are paid a six-figure sum weekly do very little th...
I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.