Let's just say, the American school of suburban angst is not my cup of tea.

This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

He must love me, i thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love, but it seemed true. Unavoidable.

There are the those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behaviour and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity.

From the time I was little, I'd been kind of freaked out by the whole deal with large groups of people. And even moderate - sized groups of people. It's always made me very uncomfortable. It's such a strange phenomenon, what happens to people when they're all moving in the same direction, all chanting the same tune, the same line of slogans or something. That stuff always seems very alien and bizarre to me, and kind of scary.

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.