Poison shared is poison halved. Or maybe it just poisons everyone equally.

This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can’t chew your way out of.

Keep your options open, his parents told him, but they didn’t tell him that growing older is about your options shutting down, one by one.

Fine is the very definition of mediocrity. It’s what’s polite. It’s what’s socially acceptable. We need to live brighter and deeper than just fine, my darling!

You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are?

They used to put people in stocks to shame them in public. Now you just need a wi-fi connection. On the internet, humiliation lives forever.

Time heals. Crushes let up. Splinters work their way out. Doesn’t mean they don’t leave scars that itch.

Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it’s only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.

This is the way the world is now. Everything is public. You have to find other people who understand.

Good manners will do that; turn a situation around. You got to treat people like people.