Alexander Masters Quotes
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..when writing a biography, you can't trust certainties. Just as you're about to pounce on something that will condemn you to a tidy answer, pooooofff! It vanishes.
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I wish I could pick you up sometimes, turn you upside down, shake all the bad things out of your head, and put you back up the right way again.
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Is this what real homelessness is like? Not just a particular set of roof and walls gone, but a sense of the death of companionship?
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Bring it on, bring the pain on, I want to face it.
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Twenty miles on, we have spotted a roadside sign: 'CHAINSAW CARVED MUSHROOMS'. Troubles promptly forgotten, Stuart falls to gawping at the road ahead. What could it all be about? 'As one victim to another,' his body language seems to marvel, 'What's a mushroom done to deserve that kind of abuse?' Not even in the worst days of street-fighting did he ever experience ill-treatment on this scale.
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Homelessness–it’s not about not having a home. It’s about something being seriously fucking wrong.
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It's a question I often ask myself: what would I do with me? And I don't know the answer. I don't know what I'd do, except run away.
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Put two macho groups together and give the first desperation and numbers, and the second truncheons and protective clothing, and the result is like a laboratory civil war.
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For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.
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I don't know, Alexander, sometimes it gets so bad you can't think of nothing better to do than make it worse.
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Disobedience is one of the few tricks you have left to hang on to the idea that you continue to exist distinctively and are still reliably connected to the person who bore your name on the outside.
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And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.
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What is left of you once your clothes have had their say?