Deborah Orr Quotes

Narcissism is not self-love. It's the opposite of that. It's a nagging horror that you are, deep down, unloveable. A narcissist needs the love, attention and admiration of others to survive because he or she cannot produce enough healthy self-respect to be at peace.

Is memoir therapy? Or is it vengeance?

Sectarianism, like all othering, all tribalism, is an expression of the ‘collective narcissism’ that found such devastating expression in Nazi Germany.

I didn’t know either that trees trade via a fungal internet that connects them underground, allowing one tree species to store excess nutrients and swap them with nutrients that other tree species have a different superfluity of. No wonder similar species don’t like to grow too near each other. Too incestuous. Too little opportunity for trade in times of hardship.

Usually, we went to Gran’s only on a Sunday, after lunch. She’d always have a few boiled sweets on display in a bowl and I’d always have one, sometimes even two. King’s of Wishaw sweets. The local sweet maker. Anything sweet, we had a local maker. Barr’s, with their Irn Bru. Tunnock’s, with their teacakes. The west of Scotland, Lanarkshire particularly, is a Mecca for sugar cultists.

When the letters came, offering me places at university, that was when it all blew up - for ever.

Young woke women now tell old white feminists that they are out of touch. They have no idea what a toxic patriarchal culture we grew up in, just a few decades ago, or how fragile the gains we have made really are.

We were alike, my dad and I, more alike than my mother and I, both in looks and in character. Finding fault with my dad was like finding fault with myself. We all have a tendency to feel the most empathy with the people who remind us most of ourselves. Yet I am like my mother too. We are all like each other, the four of us. That’s the inescapable fact of family.

Contrary to the idea that post-war Britain was full of hope, optimism and idealism, adult murmurs wouldn’t have encouraged kids to believe that things were going to change soon. The 1950s were much more a time of austerity and struggle than of the renewal and vigour that the legend of the Blitz spirit suggests.

This, this passionate anger, this repulsion, this condemnation. This feeling of powerlessness under my parents’ unflinching belief that I’d let them down by failing to be who they thought I should be? This was what it was to be loved. But