165 Quotes by Viv Albertine

I'm glad I didn't know how my life was going to turn out when I was that child lying in bed staring at the curtains. I'd have been terrified of the good things that happened just as much as the bad.

The French love their dogs. I’m always suspicious of people who adore animals, they often don’t care much for humans.

I hear a phone ringing through the thick fuzzy air. It's Thunders, asking me to join the Heartbreakers. He says to come over to the rehearsal studios right now. I’m scared but I go anyway. That should be written on my gravestone. She was scared. But she went anyway.

Sometimes my bladder is the only reason I get up. Not even hunger can shift me – the only time I can stand to be hungry is when I'm in bed. I've discovered that if I lie still and count to about ninety, the hunger pangs go away. They're like heartbreak: you just have to acknowledge the pain and wait until it passes.

The Woodcraft Folk is a youth organisation, a bit like Brownies or Scouts but it mixes boys and girls together and has an arty, bohemian vibe. [...] We call the adults in charge ‘leaders’ and address them by their Christian names – this is the first time I'm allowed to call an adult by their first name. At Woodcraft children are treated like people, not half-formed irrelevant creatures, we are consulted on every decision that's made.

It’s not so terrible a feeling, aloneness, or it’s so terrible it’s mind-blowing. I’ve never felt so present as I do now, every second on the brink of life and death. No sense of space or scale. I picture myself as a tiny person teetering on the rim of a glass of milk. (I don’t know why milk, I don’t like milk – a drink from childhood, perhaps, when I felt powerless.) I could go either way: lose my footing, fall in and drown, or recover my balance and survive.

Jeannot offers me heroin. I’m tempted. Not because I want to forget what I’ve done, or because I’m so down, even though both are true, but because I’ve lost my identity. I haven’t a clue who I am. I feel like a nothing. But I know without a doubt, if I take heroin now, I will destroy the tiny morsel of myself that is left, I will be lost forever. (Funny how heroin comes along at times like this. These guys can smell your weakness, like sharks smell blood.) I muster all my strength and say no.

I love that word. Forever. I love that forever doesn't exist, but we have a word for it anyway, and use it all the time. It's beautiful and doomed.

I’ve earned my own money since I was seventeen years old, motherhood is a huge shift in freedom and status. No one ever says, You’re good at this, well done. No one pays you. If you fuck up and drop the baby, then you’ll get some attention, but if you keep your head down and do a ‘good enough’ job, you’re ignored.