It’s kind of sad, the way we’ve turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli – something to feel guilty about if you don’t force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself. Lynn Coady Read Quote
I spent so many years in terror of ‘making it legal’ because the expression rang all too true – the wedding ritual struck me as nothing but a flowery front for the fulfilment of countless, tedious contracts and obligations. Lynn Coady Read Quote
I’ve never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance. Lynn Coady Read Quote
Atheism is a moral position – a rather rigid one, if you’ve ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. Lynn Coady Read Quote
Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let’s face it – you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things. Lynn Coady Read Quote
True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we’ve expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways. Lynn Coady Read Quote
However long, it’s definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness – that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness – always a surprise no matter how often it’s happened – that their lives are very different from your own. Lynn Coady Read Quote
It’s doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista. Lynn Coady Read Quote
There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable – this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange. Lynn Coady Read Quote