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Only Teenagers Think Boring Is Bad. Adults, Grown Men And Women Who've Been Around The Block A Few Times, Know That Boring Is A Gift Straight From God. Life Has More Than Enough Excitement Up Its Sleeve, Ready To Hit You With As Soon As You're Not Looking, Without You Adding To The Drama.

-Tana French

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Only Teenagers Think Boring

Tana French

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Only Teenagers Think Boring Is Bad. Adults, Grown Men And Women Who've Been Around The Block A Few Times, Know That Boring Is A Gift Straight From God. Life Has More Than Enough Excitement Up Its Sleeve, Ready To Hit You With As Soon As You're Not Looking, Without You Adding To The Drama.

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I’m The Least Fanciful Guy Around, But On Nights When I Wonder Whether There Was Any Point To My Day, I Think About This: The First Thing We Ever Did, When We Started Turning Into Humans, Was Draw A Line Across The Cave Door And Say: Wild Stays Out. What I Do Is What The First Men Did. They Built Walls To Keep Back The Sea. They Fought The Wolves For The Hearth Fire.

I Had Always Felt That I Was An Observer, Never A Participant; That I Was Watching From Behind A Thick Glass Wall As People Went About The Business Of Living--and Did It With Such Ease, With A Skill That They Took For Granted And That I Had Never Known.

We Were Still At The Age When Girls Are Years Older Than Guy, And The Guys Grow Up By Doing Their Best When The Girls Need Them To.

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I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect.

...and Our Footsteps Rang And Echoed Till It Sounded Like The Room Was Full Of Dancers, The House Calling Up All The People Who Had Danced Here Across Centuries Of Spring Evenings, Gallant Girls Seeing Gallant Boys Off To War, Old Men And Women Straight-backed While Outside Their World Disintegrated And The New One Battered At Their Doors, All Of Them Bruised And All Of Them Laughing, Welcoming Us Into Their Long Lineage.

Regardless Of The Advertising Campaigns May Tell Us, We Can't Have It All. Sacrifice Is Not An Option, Or An Anachronism; It's A Fact Of Life. We All Cut Off Our Own Limbs To Burn On Some Altar. The Crucial Thing Is To Choose An Altar That's Worth It And A Limb You Can Accept Losing. To Go Consenting To The Sacrifice.

Maybe She, Like Me, Would Have Loved The Tiny Details And Inconveniences Even More Dearly Than The Wonders, Because They Are The Things That Prove You Belong.

I Had Learned Early To Assume Something Dark And Lethal Hidden At The Heart Of Anything I Loved. When I Couldn't Find It, I Responded, Bewildered And Wary, In The Only Way I Knew How: By Planting It There Myself.

I've Got This Theory That Human Beings Are Innately Religious; We Have A Belief System. It Doesn't Have To Be A Theist Form, Necessarily. But We Need A Belief System, Some Framework On Which To Hang Our Behavior.

I Love Writing. I Feel Ridiculously Lucky That This Is What I Get To Do All Day.

This Is The One Thing I Hope: That She Never Stopped. I Hope When Her Body Couldn't Run Any Farther She Left It Behind Like Everything Else That Tried To Hold Her Down, She Floored The Pedal And She Went Like Wildfire, Streamed Down Night Freeways With Both Hands Off The Wheel And Her Head Back Screaming To The Sky Like A Lynx, White Lines And Green Lights Whipping Away Into The Dark, Her Tires Inches Off The Ground And Freedom Crashing Up Her Spine.

Real Isn't What They Try To Tell You. Time Isn't. Grown-ups Hammer Down All These Markers, Bells, Schedules, Coffee-breaks, To Stake Down Time So You'll Start Believing It's Something Small And Mean, Something That Scrapes Flake After Flake Off Of Everything You Love Till There's Nothing Left; To Stake You Down So You Don't Lift Off And Fly Away, Somersaulting Through Whirlpools Of Months, Skimming Through Eddies Of Glittering Seconds, Pouring Handfuls Of Hours Over Your Upturned Face.

The Smell Of The Sea Swept Over The Wall And In Through The Empty Window-hole, Wide And Wild With A Million Intoxicating Secrets. I Don't Trust That Smell. It Hooks Us Somewhere Deeper Than Reason Or Civilization, In The Fragments Of Our Cells That Rocked In Oceans Before We Had Minds, And It Pulls Till We Follow Mindlessly As Rutting Animals....it Lures Us To Leap Off High Cliffs, Fling Ourselves On Towering Waves, Leaves Behind Everyone We Love And Face Into Thousands Of Miles Of Open Water For The Sake Of What Might Be On The Far Shore.

Sarte Was Right, Hell Is Other People

If You Rewrite A Paragraph Fifty Times And Forty-nine Of Them Are Terrible, That's Fine; You Only Need To Get It Right Once.

What I Am Telling You, Before You Begin My Story, Is This -- Two Things: I Crave Truth. And I Lie.

There's A Spanish Proverb," He Said, "that's Always Fascinated Me. "take What You Want And Pay For It, Says God.'" "i Don't Believe In God," Daniel Said, "but That Principle Seems, To Me, To Have A Divinity Of Its Own; A Kind Of Blazing Purity. What Could Be Simpler, Or More Crucial? You Can Have Anything You Want, As Long As You Accept That There Is A Price And That You Will Have To Pay It.

If You're Writing A Scene For A Character With Whom You Disagree In Every Way, You Still Need To Show How That Character Is Absolutely Justified In His Or Her Own Mind, Or The Scene Will Come Across As Being About The Author's Views Rather Than About The Character's.

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I Read A Lot. I Always Have, But In Those Two Years I Gorged Myself On Books With A Voluptuous, Almost Erotic Gluttony. I Would Go To The Local Library And Take Out As Many As I Could, And Then Lock Myself In The Bedsit And Read Solidly For A Week. I Went For Old Books, The Older The Better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean Tragedies, A Dusty Translation Of Laclos - So That When I Finally Resurfaced, Blinking And Dazzled, It Took Me Days To Stop Thinking In Their Cool, Polished, Crystalline Rhythms.

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With Acting, You Have To Depend On Somebody Else To Decide If You Are Allowed To Work. You Can Spend Weeks And Months When You Are Not Acting At All.

I Listen To The Things People Want Out Of Love These Days And They Blow My Mind. I Go To The Pub With The Boys From The Squad And Listen While They Explain, With Minute Precision, Exactly What Shape A Woman Should Be, What Bits She Should Shave How, What Acts She Should Perform On Which Date And What She Should Always Or Never Do Or Say Or Want; I Eavesdrop On Women In Cafes While They Reel Off Lists Of Which Jobs A Man Is Allowed, Which Cars, Which Labels, Which Flowers And Restaurants And Gemstones Get The Stamp Of Approval, And I Want To Shout, Are You People Out Of Your Tiny Minds?

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When We Can't See A Pattern, We Fit Pieces Together Until One Takes Shape, Because We Have To.

What I Warn You To Remember Is That I Am A Detective. Our Relationship With Truth Is Fundamental But Cracked, Refracting Confusingly Like Fragmented Glass. It Is The Core Of Our Careers, The Endgame Of Every Move We Make, And We Pursue It With Strategies Painstakingly Constructed Of Lies And Concealment And Every Variation On Deception.

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Only Teenagers Think Boring Is Bad. Adults, Grown Men And Women Who've Been Around The Block A Few Times, Know That Boring Is A Gift Straight From God. Life Has More Than Enough Excitement Up Its Sleeve, Ready To Hit You With As Soon As You're Not Looking, Without You Adding To The Drama.

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Take What You Want And Pay For It, Says God. You Can Have Anything You Want, As Long As You Accept That There Is A Price And You Will Have To Pay It.

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Privately, I Consider Religion To Be A Load Of Bollocks, But When You Have A Sobbing Five Year Old Wanting To Know What Happened To Her Hamster, You Develop An Instant Belief In Anything That Dissolves Some Of The Heartbreak Off Her Face.

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When I Was Acting, I Got Trained In Creating A Character As A Three-dimensional Person. If You're Doing It Right You Should Be Able To Draw An Audience Into The Character's World And Make Them Feel Their Fears.

The Girls I Dream Of Are The Gentle Ones, Wistful By High Windows Or Singing Sweet Old Songs At A Piano, Long Hair Drifting, Tender As Apple Blossom. But A Girl Who Goes Into Battle Beside You And Keeps Your Back Is A Different Thing, A Thing To Make You Shiver. Think Of The First Time You Slept With Someone, Or The First Time You Fell In Love: That Blinding Explosion That Left You Cracking To The Fingertips With Electricity, Initiated And Transformed. I Tell You That Was Nothing, Nothing At All, Beside The Power Of Putting Your Lives, Simply And Daily, Into Each Other's Hands.

You Forget What It Was Like. You'd Swear On Your Life You Never Will, But Year By Year It Falls Away. How Your Temperature Ran Off The Mercury, Your Heart Galloped Flat-out And Never Needed To Rest, Everything Was Pitched On The Edge Of Shattering Glass. How Wanting Something Was Like Dying Of Thirst. How Your Skin Was Too Fine To Keep Out Any Of The Million Things Flooding By; Every Color Boiled Bright Enough To Scald You, Any Second Of Any Day Could Send You Soaring Or Rip You To Bloody Shreds.

This Girl: She Bent Reality Around Her Like A Lens Bending Light, She Pleated It Into So Many Flickering Layers That You Could Never Tell Which One You Were Looking At, The Longer You Stared The Dizzier You Got.

That Kind Of Friendship Doesn't Just Materialize At The End Of The Rainbow One Morning In A Soft-focus Hollywood Haze. For It To Last This Long, And At Such Close Quarters, Some Serious Work Had Gone Into It. Ask Any Ice-skater Or Ballet Dancer Or Show Jumper, Anyone Who Lives By Beautiful Moving Things: Nothing Takes As Much Work As Effortlessness.

I Came From A House Full Of Books, So I Took Reading For Granted. I Was An Outdoorsy Little Kid, Too, So I Got The Best Of Both Worlds By Taking Books Up Trees And Reading There.

We Had No One Else To Learn This From- None Of Our Parents Were Shining Examples Of Relationship Success- So We Learned This From Each Other: When Someone You Love Needs You To, You Can Get A Hold Of Your Five-alarm Temper, Get A Hold Of The Shapeless Things That Scare You Senseless, Act Like An Adult Instead Of The Cro-magnon Teenager You Are, You Can Do A Million Things You Never Saw Coming.

Sometimes I Think About The Sly, Flickering Line That Separates Being Spared From Being Rejected. Sometimes I Think Of The Ancient Gods Who Demanded That Their Sacrifices Be Fearless And Without Blemish, And I Wonder Whether, Whoever Or Whatever Took Peter And Jamie Away, It Decided I Wasn't Good Enough.

You Don't Have To Like Your Family, You Don't Even Have To Spend Time With Them, To Know Them Right Down To The Bone.

People Need A Moral Code, To Help Them Make Decisions. All This Bio-yogurt Virtue And Financial Self-righteousness Are Just Filling The Gap In The Market. But The Problem Is That It's All Backwards. It's Not That You Do The Right Thing And Hope It Pays Off; The Morally Right Thing Is By Definition The Thing That Gives The Biggest Payoff.

Both Back When I Was Acting And Now That I'm Writing, I've Always Wanted The Same Thing Out Of My Career: To Be Able To Get Up In The Morning And Do What I Love Doing.

I Wasn't Sure I Could Make It Through Another Hour Of His Company Without Throwing My Stapler At His Head.

People You Knew When You Were Teenagers, The Ones Who Saw Your Stupidest Haircut And The Most Embarrassing Things You've Done In Your Life, And They Still Cared About You After All That: They're Not Replaceable, You Know?

When You're Too Close To People, When You Spend Too Much Time With Them And Love Them Too Dearly, Sometimes You Can't See Them

I Am, Of Course, Romanticizing; A Chronic Tendency Of Mine.

Some People Are Little Chernobyls, Shimmering With Silent, Spreading Poison: Get Anywhere Near Them And Every Breath You Take Will Wreck You From The Inside Out.

We Think About Mortality So Little, These Days, Except To Flail Hysterically At It With Trendy Forms Of Exercise And High-fiber Cereals And Nicotine Patches.

A Bore Or An Uggo Might Manage Not To Get Up Anyone's Nose, But If A Girl's Got Brains And Looks And Personality, She's Going To Piss Someone Off, Somewhere Along The Way.

But Give Me More Credit Than That. Someone Else May Have Dealt The Hand, But I Picked It Up Off The Table, I Played Every Card, And I Had My Reasons.

I Have Always Been Caught By The Pull Of The Unremarkable, By The Easily Missed, Infinitely Nourishing Beauty Of The Mundane.

I Thought I Could Never Write A Proper Book; I'd Never Done It Before. But I Thought I Could Write A Sequence. Then I Had A Chapter. The Next Thing I Knew I Was Turning Acting Down.

We Think Of Mortality So Little These Days... I Thought Of The Stern Victorian Determination To Keep Death In Mind, The Uncompromising Tombstones. Remember, Pilgrim, As You Pass By, As You Are Now So Once Was I: As I Am So Will You Be.

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