Joe Dunthorne Quotes

“I love you more than words. And I am a big fan of words.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“I took a photo of us, mid-embrace. When I am old and alone I will remember that I once held something truly beautiful.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“Exercise II.
Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous. I have written an example to get you started:
Dear Diary,
I spent the morning admiring my skin elasticity.
God alive, I feel supple.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“I don't know if I've come of age, but I'm certainly older now. I feel shrunken, as if there's a tiny ancient Oliver Tate inside me operating the levers of a life-size Oliver-shaped shell. A shell on which a decrepit picture show replays the same handful of images. Every night I come to the same place and wait till the sky catches up with my mood. The pattern is set. This is, no doubt, the end.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“Most people think of themselves as individuals, that there's no one on the planet like them. This thought motivates them to get out of bed, eat food and walk around like nothing's wrong. My name is Oliver Tate.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“I want to grab her collarbones as if they were handlebars.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“That's a big love letter," she says, squinting. I know what I'm going to say and for a moment I wish there was a film crew documenting my day-to-day life: "I've got a big heart," I say.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“I find that the only way to get through life is to picture myself in an entirely disconnected reality. I often imagine how people would react to my death. Mr Dunthorne's quavering voice as he makes the announcement. The shocked faces of my classmates. A playground bedecked with flowers. The empty stillness of a school corridor. Local news analysis ... The steady stoicism of my parents ... Candlelit vigils ... And finally, my glorious resurrection.”

— 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

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

— Joe Dunthorne

“I spin around on the swivel chair and look up at the ceiling; Oliver being Oliver being Oliver being Oliver. I am suddenly aware of the separation between my-actual-self and myself-as-seen-by-others. Who would win in an arm wrestle? Who is better-looking? Who has the higher IQ?”

— Joe Dunthorne

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

— 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

“It is strange to hear your mother talk about being human because, honestly, it's too easy to forget.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“To us and a wonderful evening of love making.”

— 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

“Ever since Jordana dumpled me, I've started feeling like a middle-aged person. I think it is to do with trauma. I just walk around doing and impression of a sixteen-year-old.”

— 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

“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

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

— Joe Dunthorne

“One more word that may be useful in the heat of passion: dong. Dong sounds like someone very important has just arrived.”

— 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

“Her eyebrows were so blonde they were almost invisible, making it difficult for her to look angry, apologetic or quizzical.”

— 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

“The queen-size bed has a wooden frame and a dark-orange duvet cover and pillows. The bedside tables on both sides are identically stocked: three books, a lamp and a glasses case. I wonder if this allows my parents to swap sides during the night. I turn on one of the lamps, lighting the room like a sexy library.”

— 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

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

“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

I tell my parents I'm going out for pudding. They think this might be a nickname for heroin.Mum makes the international face for 'is there anything you want to tell me?'

— 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

“I am drawn to the ocean; I find solace in its mystery.”

— 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

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

Your diary should be a nepenthe.

— Joe Dunthorne

“When I am very sad, I tend towards symbolism.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“I authorize an air strike that reduces my street to rubble; I fold Swansea Bay like an enormous omelette and scoff it all”

— Joe Dunthorne

“I want birds to have strips of my soppy diary to pad out their nests. I want the mother birds to regurgitate food for their young and little bits of half-chewed sick to accidentally landon my name.”

— Joe Dunthorne

I remembered his expression remained not exactly bored so much as philosophically separate

— Joe Dunthorne

“I am in awe of Sam's decision to abandon capitals and punctuation but am not brave enough to do the same. I like to imagine the day he, as the Americans say, made the change he wished to see in the world. I like to think it came to him suddenly. Perhaps he was swimming - no, too active - or napping indoors on a hot day - no, too bourgeois - probably he was in Scotland during the midge season and he left the desk lamp on and the window open when he went out for a meaningful walk. It was dark and the midges were drawn to the lamplight and - thinking it was the moon - fried themselves against the bulb, falling in their tens and tens, cooked on the pages of Sam's poems. So when he returned some time later, with bites on his neck, he found his poems loaded with punctuation, asterisks, grammar lying dead on his manuscript and his instant reaction was disgust, a feeling that then infected his whole aesthetic.”

— Joe Dunthorne

“He communicated via napkin which was probably a Brechtian alienation device.
wonder if it possible for you to sleep on stage because I've got poem where I say things about you while you sleep?
I asked to hear the poem first and he wrote: whole point is your not knowing.
Hard to believe they fund his PhD.”

— Joe Dunthorne

The ocean is six miles deep.

— Joe Dunthorne

There will be birds and if they write your name in the sky then you can get on the buses and if they don't you have to die on the floor.

— Joe Dunthorne

“The smoke rolls along the low ceiling and pours up into the night - a reverse waterfall - like when the kettle boils beneath the plate cupboard.”

— Joe Dunthorne

Write a diary, imagining that you are trying to make an old person jealous.

— Joe Dunthorne