Submarine Joe Dunthorne Quotes

I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words.

I took a photo of us, mid-embrace. When I am old and alone I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful.

Exercise II. Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started: Dear Diary, I spent the morning admiring my skin elasticity. God alive, I feel supple.

Most people think of themselves as individuals, that there's no one on the planet like them. This thought motivates them to get out of bed, eat food and walk around like nothing's wrong. My name is Oliver Tate.

...I want to grab her collarbones as if they were handlebars.

That's a big love letter," she says, squinting. I know what I'm going to say and for a moment I wish there was a film crew documenting my day-to-day life: "I've got a big heart," I say.

I would never say snog. I would say osculate." She looks at me as if to say: why do you exist?

I don't know if I've come of age, but I'm certainly older now. I feel shrunken, as if there's a tiny ancient Oliver Tate inside me operating the levers of a life-size Oliver-shaped shell. A shell on which a decrepit picture show replays the same handful of images. Every night I come to the same place and wait till the sky catches up with my mood. The pattern is set. This is, no doubt, the end.

Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner.

She whispers in my ear: ‘"Tell me that you wan' fuck me hard, make me sweat." In the excitement, she misses out a word. "I want to fuck you so hard that your body drips with sweat," I say, grammatically.

Oh diary, I love her, I love her, I love her so much. Jordana is the most amazing person I have ever met. I could eat her. I could drink her blood. She's the only person I would allow to be shrunk to microscopic size and explore me in a tiny submersible machine. She is wonderful and beautiful and sensitive and funny and sexy. She's too good for me, she's too good for anyone! All I could do was let her know. I said: "I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words.

Anger does not come easy to me. It is something I have to encourage, like a greyhound in second place.

It is strange to hear your mother talk about being human because, honestly, it's too easy to forget.

I spin around on the swivel chair and look up at the ceiling; Oliver being Oliver being Oliver being Oliver. I am suddenly aware of the separation between my-actual-self and myself-as-seen-by-others. Who would win in an arm wrestle? Who is better-looking? Who has the higher IQ?

To us and a wonderful evening of love making.

I bought a packet of Trojan® Ultra Pleasure Extra Sensitive condoms: ‘No. 1 in AMERICA’. They smell nothing like a positive first sexual experience.

I find that the only way to get through life is to picture myself in an entirely disconnected reality. I often imagine how people would react to my death. Mr Dunthorne's quavering voice as he makes the announcement. The shocked faces of my classmates. A playground bedecked with flowers. The empty stillness of a school corridor. Local news analysis. . . . The steady stoicism of my parents. . . . Candlelit vigils. . . . And finally, my glorious resurrection.

Are we making a bomb?" "This is a trust exercise, like in drama," she says. "Are we making a bomb as a trust exercise?

For my last birthday, Dad bought me a pocket-sized Collins English Dictionary. It would only fit in a pocket that had been specially designed.

After that, we had a short conversation about how your body can sometimes seem totally separate. She said her body can feel like a distant bureaucracy controlled by telegrams from her brain, and I said my body is sometimes like that of Mario Mario, being controlled with a Nintendo joypad. Mario's surname is Mario.

Ever since Jordana dumpled me, I've started feeling like a middle-aged person. I think it is to do with trauma. I just walk around doing and impression of a sixteen-year-old.

I would never say snog. I would say osculate.” She looks at me as if to say: why do you exist?

Problems are like top trumps. I have a pretty good card: Adulterous Mum. But Jordana's is still better: Tumour Mother.

The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.

Her eyebrows were so blonde they were almost invisible, making it difficult for her to look angry, apologetic or quizzical.

I am drawn to the ocean; I find solace in its mystery.

My mother tells me I do not chew my food enough; she says I am making it harder for my body to get the essential nutrients it needs. If she were here, I would remind her that I am eating a blueberry Pop-Tart.

One more word that may be useful in the heat of passion: dong. Dong sounds like someone very important has just arrived.

When I am very sad, I tend towards symbolism.

Old people only say that life happens quickly to make themselves feel better. The truth is that it all happens in tiny increments like now now now now now now and it only takes twenty to thirty consecutive nows to realize that you’re aimed straight at a bench in Singleton Park. Fair play though, if I was old and had forgotten to do something worthwhile with my life, I would spend those final few years on a bench in the botanical gardens, convincing myself that time is so quick that even plants – who have no responsibilities whatsoever – hardly get a chance to do anything decent with their lives except, perhaps, produce one or two red or yellow flowers and, with a bit of luck and insects, reproduce. If the old man manages to get the words father and husband on his bench plaque then he thinks he can be reasonably proud of himself.

I tell my parents I'm going out for pudding. They think this might be a nickname for heroin.Mum makes the international face for 'is there anything you want to tell me?'

I want the evening upon which we lose our collective virginities to be special. I'm no parthenologist but I suspect that Jordana's virginity is still intact. Her biological knowledge is minimal. She thinks that a perineum is to do with glacial moraine.

I was camped at the same site as her: Broughton Farm. She came over to my tent and showed me her blisters. She asked me whether I knew the reason why a blister can keep on producing fluid ad infinitum. I said that I had always wondered the same thing about mucus. One of the reasons we are together is because we have similar interests.

I tell myself not to feel sexually threatened. I am of no special interest; he could just as easily be angling for the printer.

The ocean is six miles deep.

Your diary should be a nepenthe.

Thursday morning. I usually let my Mum wake me up but today I have set my alarm for seven. Even from under my duvet, I can hear it bleating on the other side of my room. I hid it inside my plastic crate for faulty joysticks so that I would have to get out of bed, walk across the room, yank it out of the box by its lead and, only then, jab the snooze button. This was a tactical manoeuvre by my previous self. He can be very cruel.

The queen-size bed has a wooden frame and a dark-orange duvet cover and pillows. The bedside tables on both sides are identically stocked: three books, a lamp and a glasses case. I wonder if this allows my parents to swap sides during the night. I turn on one of the lamps, lighting the room like a sexy library.

Oliver, we’ve got something to tell you,” Dad says, dumping a cardboard box full of garden waste into a toad green mangler. Unlike the doctor, when Dad says we, he means we because Mum is omnipotent. “Who’s dead?” I ask, shot-putting a bottle of Richebourg. “No one’s dead.” “You’re getting a divorce?” “Oliver.” “Mum’s preggers?” “No, we—” “I’m adopted.” “Oliver! Please, shit up!

Once you’ve been through certain experiences, you may as well accept that your life from that point on will be one massive Ferris wheel of the same emotional trauma, relived and recycled, over and over.

Nuestro sistema solar tiene nueve planetas, siendo Saturno el más grande. Las formas de vida de Saturno son silenciosas. No necesitan boca porque se comunican a través del pensamiento, no del habla. «Quiero quedarme en mi habitación», le dice mentalmente un joven saturnino a su madre. Su madre lo comprende a la perfección. Capta el significado de lo que le dice de un modo que los monosílabos hablados de la Tierra jamás serán capaces de replicar. Sabe que a su hijo le apetece estar un rato a solas, sin que le pregunten si está bien, sin que se preocupen por él, sin necesidad de ir dejándole folletos explicativos por toda la casa.

I authorize an air strike that reduces my street to rubble; I fold Swansea Bay like an enormous omelette and scoff it all

Our Welsh teacher thinks he is young. He tells us that the Welsh for skiving in town is ‘mitchio yn y dre’.

The smoke rolls along the low ceiling and pours up into the night - a reverse waterfall - like when the kettle boils beneath the plate cupboard.

Unhappy people have a role in society—and that is to make the rest of us feel better.

Seducing Jordana was solid – she's got such high standards – but when I finally got the snogs in it was all worth it." I transform Jordana's blather into high-level discourse: Lounging in a post-osculatory glow, I knew that all those months of hard chivalry had been worthwhile.

We asked our Welsh teacher, Mr Llewellyn – who is young, to tell us the Welsh sex words. The Welsh word for sex is ‘rhyw’. It sounds like coughing. He said that, in general, Welsh-speakers use English words. When pressed, he gave us a couple of examples to show us why this might be. ‘Llawes goch’ means ‘red sleeve’. ‘Coes fach’ means ‘small leg’. The phrase would be: ‘Put your small leg in my red sleeve’.

I am one of those servants – butlers usually – who respectfully points out when their master is about to do something stupid: "You should probably only burn the document once the blackmail has been completed, m' lady.

Jordana is in the umpire's highchair. I walk under the rugby posts and on to the tennis courts, stopping a few metres in front of her, in the service box. Her legs are crossed. I wait for her to speak. 'I have two special skills,' she says. She pulls a sheaf of papers from under her bum. I recognize the font and the text boxes. It's my pamphlet. 'Blackmail,' she says. She holds up her Zippo in the other hand. I can tell that she has been practising this. 'And pyromania.' I am impressed that Jordana knows this word. 'Right,' I say. 'I'm going to blackmail you, Ol.' I feel powerless. She is in a throne. 'Okay,' I say.

The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her. "I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear." She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again.

Unhappy people have a role in society – and that is to make the rest of us feel better.

I do not believe in scenery but still, there it is.

I expect Mum to remind me that these relationships mean nothing when you are forty-three. Or to at least wheel out a cliché: there are plenty more fish in the sea. There are fish but also whales and crustaceans and shipwrecks and a dozen or so submersible military vehicles.

I want birds to have strips of my soppy diary to pad out their nests. I want the mother birds to regurgitate food for their young and little bits of half-chewed sick to accidentally landon my name.

The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that is too late to save her. “I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is in the same shape as a falling tear.” She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle.

I am embarrassed; Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct was more subtle than this.

Do you hate me now?" "I'm hiding it. The hate." "I see." "I'm pretending it's not there." "You're sweet." "It's there though." "I know." "It's there.

The word defenestration, the act of throwing someone or something out of a window, was first coined after a Polish revolution in 1605 when they threw the royal family through the palace windows.