Joe Dunthorne Quotes

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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’.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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!

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

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

~ Joe Dunthorne

He had a bad feeling that there was literally no one he could think of who wasn't in some very significant way a let-down.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne

The ocean is six miles deep.

~ Joe Dunthorne

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.

~ Joe Dunthorne