Quotes by Joe Dunthorne

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. Shes 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. Shes too good for me, shes 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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. Marios surname is Mario.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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’.

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

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!

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

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

He had a bad feeling that there was literally no one he could think of who wasnt in some very significant way a let-down.