‘You can drink in a bar and sober up in the basement of a church, but everyone sleeps (or lies awake) in solitude.’
These are the ranks of the obsessive, the dissatisfied, the distorted, the strange: drug addicts, fetishists, compulsive cleaners, collectors of cats or snow globes or Caravaggios. Maybe everyone has something like this, large or small, pathological or merely unusual: something that serves, in the p…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘She wanted to enjoy herself, she wanted to try, but she didn't know where to begin.’
‘How little one knows, really, about one’s parents.’
Memoir by Didier Eribon translated by Michael Lucey.
‘Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends.’
Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison on the commodification of the imagination.
‘No one is alone in their bed anymore.’
An excerpt from Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston.
‘I have not failed you, José. I understand that you were saying goodbye when you opened your eye, and that, besides greeting me, you were expressing your pride in me, seeing me standing with my arm around the shoulders of your granddaughter.’
