Lynne Truss
Writer
1955-05-31
Quotes by Lynne Truss
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Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala.
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...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.
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If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
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Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.
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To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as Thank God its Friday (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive its (no apostrophe) with the contractive it's (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian kill response in the average stickler.
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I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.
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I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.
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Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.
Read quote -
To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as Thank God its Friday (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive its (no apostrophe) with the contractive it's (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian kill response in the average stickler.
Read quote -
Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, buy the fifth series of The Sopranos, divorce your spouse, sell up and move to Devon, or adopt a child from Guatemala.
Read quote -
If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
Read quote -
...intelligence nowadays is all about application: it is the ability 'to take in a complex system and learn its rules on the fly'. For young people, this ability is second nature. Any fool knows that, if you need a new and unfamiliar VCR programmed in a hurry, you commandeer any small passing child to do it.
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I do needlepoint from kits. I give them as gifts to people in the form of cushion covers and they are often speechless with horror.
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I used to help my dad with a stall selling eggs when I was about 12. People were so hard up they would ask for one egg. But mostly no one came by at all. It was very demoralising.
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Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.
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Texting is a fundamentally sneaky form of communication, which we should despise, but it is such a boon we don't care. We are all sneaks now.
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In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.
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All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.
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Nice clothes fall apart. Nice clocks don't work. Bits fall off the nice cooker. It is hard to accept that pricing is unrelated to quality, but it's plainly true. Nowadays, we pay the price that satisfies our particular personality type; and then we live with the painful consequences.
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