* 𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒈𝒊𝒄 𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒆 𝒑𝒕. 2
sentence starters based on scarlett thomas’ novel our tragic universe. change however necessary.
tw: depression, relationship conflict, infidelity, emotional abuse/manipulation
❛ i’m a fucking failure . i might as well admit it . ❜
❛ everything’s shit . i can’t do anything without making a mess of it . ❜
❛ i didn’t mean what i said before . i wouldn’t kill you . i wouldn’t even blame you . ❜
❛ what happened to us ? i don’t know if i’m even good for you anymore . i fuck everything up . ❜
❛ he often said that he wanted to minimize the footprint he was making on the environment , but i sometimes wondered whether really he didn’t want the environment to make a footprint on him as it trudged on into an unknown future . ❜
❛ surely it didn’t matter where you were , as long as you were happy ? ❜
❛ i fail all the time , but it’s just not so obvious . ❜
❛ life isn’t all about success . we don’t all have to be [ name ] . it’s ok to just be . that’s what we’re doing , isn’t it ? ❜
❛ we could build our farm and live off the land . then none of it would matter . ❜
❛ we would live happily ever after because of all that stuff , not despite it . ❜
❛ i am a monster . fuck . i said i wasn’t , but i am . ❜
❛ i’m a real shit sometimes , but i do love you . ❜
❛ sometimes [ name ] talked about what she felt for [ name ] , and i just couldn’t understand it . she seemed to want him , not what he could give her . ❜
❛ do you know the difference between a lie and a story ? ❜
❛ it’s not a bad thing to be good at telling stories , and in some ways everything we tell is a story , but sometimes it’s good to remember which parts of the stories we tell are true , and which parts are made up . ❜
❛ you’re not the kind of person to overcome monsters . that’s a good thing , isn’t it ? remember the story of beauty and the beast ? the beast looked like a monster , and all he needed was love , and then when beauty really loved him he turned into a prince . in that story , beauty didn’t overcome the monster either ; she loved him , and they lived happily ever after . ❜
❛ if a monster , or something you call a monster , comes to see you and you become its friend , it stops being a monster , at least to you . in that sense , there don’t have to be any such thing as monsters . you have to decide something is a monster before it becomes one . ❜
❛ i suppose in an ideal world you would go your separate ways and leave each other alone . ❜
❛ the main thing is that you don’t have to be violent towards something just because you don’t like it . ❜
❛ in a sense you could say he hasn’t made anything of himself , because he hasn’t become rich and famous , and he doesn’t have a family and a house , but he’s very happy with his simple life . ❜
❛ i was looking back at him , and suddenly something happened with our eyes : they touched . somewhere in the air between us , we touched without touching . ❜
❛ i wanted to run my theory past you . do you mind if i do it now ? it looks like we’re stuck here for a while , and there’s no one else to really talk to about this . ❜
❛ it seemed to be one of the small sadnesses of contemporary life that there was always someone in your office , or down the road , or across the river who understood your inner soul better than you partner did . ❜
❛ [ name ] had seemed to understand my inner soul once , i remembered , but he was well out of date on that score now . ❜
❛ it’s an interesting conversation to have while we wait to drown . ❜
❛ disaster is built into every man-made system . ❜
❛ people are simply reading technology as tragic . people somehow know that technology is always doomed . all that hubris . ❜
❛ all stories of success begin with failure , and the reverse . love stories begin with loneliness ; loneliness stories begin with love . ❜
❛ narrative has to have patterns , other it wouldn’t be narrative , and while life doesn’t have to have patterns , the minute we express it as narrative it does have to have patterns ; it has to make sense . therefore we impose patterns on life in order that we can express it as narrative . ❜
❛ whenever something good happens , we start anticipating its end . ❜
❛ i wanted to take his arm , or his hand , but i didn’t . ❜
❛ it’s too depressing ; no one wants anything ; no one does anything ; there are no questions to be resolved . ❜
❛ things seem like magic only when we don’t understand the underlying forces that make them happen . ❜
❛ perhaps he’d been killed in an accident , and that was why he hadn’t been at the bus stop . If he had been killed , i found myself thinking , then i’d be free . i erased the thought from my mind , but I couldn’t undo the fact that i’d had the thought in the first place . ❜
❛ here , in front of me , were so many different kinds of madness that i could hardly breathe . ❜
❛ I wondered if there really were that many people who felt so victimized by contemporary life . ❜
❛ i find it all so depressing , but i don’t know why . ❜
❛ i’ve got a friend who says that the human being is a big computer that can compute everything that machines can’t — feeling , emotion and so on . ❜
❛ i want [ name ] to start taking an interest in me , and i want some passion in my life . ❜
❛ if everyone had money and love and creative talent there’d be no need for world peace . ❜
❛ everything i’d ever thought about it had seemed like a good idea once , and then i had another ‘ good idea ’ and had to delete the one before . ❜
❛ life is a great quest , and you are its hero . the purpose of life is the completion of the quest . To complete the quest you must work out what you most want to find in some faraway cave , then take some weapons , go out and find the cave and get this thing . anything that stands in your way is a monster . ❜
❛ some beings have to be monsters , because otherwise how do you define other beings as heroes ? ❜
❛ it just wasn’t any good to find out that you are a monster and overcome yourself : the monster has to be outside you , and you have to kill it and move on until you get your treasure and your princess and become enlightened and then ascend to the road to perfection . ❜
❛ no . i mean she’s gone . i don’t know where . ❜
❛ it’s not really a mystery to me , but i’m too tired of it all to try to understand . ❜
❛ i was going to say i was sorry and i hoped his hand felt better , but actually i’m not sorry and i hope it drops off . ❜
❛ he didn’t say much . it was obviously one of those things i was supposed to know never to mention . ❜
❛ maybe there was always something . but there was also always the sense that if the something could be fixed , then all would be perfect . ❜
❛ i’ll never know , because i can never ask him about it again . you know how you can only ever talk about a problem once with [ name ] and then if you bring it up again he goes totally crackers ? ❜
❛ [ name ] could be a real skeptic when he wanted to be , which made his belief in aliens and sea monsters all the more interesting . ❜
❛ it means i’m not as mad as i thought i was . ❜
❛ if the future has already happened , or , at least , if it’s possible to compute , then of course you can predict it . ❜
❛ if a person’s collective thoughts are not kept in their head , but outside in a collective space , then anyone can access them . ❜
❛ I think the wrong type of person senses that there’s more power out there than they’ve been given access to , and so they pretend they’ve got it . ❜
❛ you’re always going to see fraudsters and tricksters out there on the street , peddling what they’ve got , because there’s no other way for them to live . ❜
❛ but what’s the point of it all ? this universe that’s just data . ❜
❛ death has to be what defines life , since living things are those things that will die but are not yet dead . ❜
❛ i saw the people themselves , already bad copies of pictures in magazines , aging , breaking , dying , for no reason at all , just like everything they ever bought . ❜
❛ each time two of them kiss in a disco , they imagine they are embarking on a perfect romance . ❜
❛ the people will lie , kill or steal for these items , which they believe to be love potions , beauty creams , elixirs of success or even flat-pack fairy castles . but in fact all they are trading are empty cardboard boxes , which they stack up in their houses until there are too many and then they throw some away . ❜
❛ why would you choose to die if there was an alternative ? ❜
❛ i half-wanted to say sorry , but i didn’t , because i also half-wanted to scream at him that it was his own fault , that everything he was upset about was his own fault . ❜
❛ i’m not sure i love you anymore , and i didn’t want to be anywhere near you this evening because you’re a fucking lunatic . ❜
❛ instead of comforting me , as i thought he would , he said , in a cold voice , ‘ you are just like your mother , ’ and left the room . i knew then that i’d lost him forever . ❜
❛ [ name ] didn’t like us playing together , so we’d stopped . ❜
❛ pretty shit . i keep having to go and cry in the toilet . ❜
❛ i don’t think i can come out tonight , unfortunately , which is such a bummer because i so don’t want to be at home . ❜
❛ of course , people did look after others in this way , sometimes for years . what was so wrong with me that i could barely manage it for a day ? ❜
❛ please don’t leave me alone . the world’s sort of vibrating . ❜
❛ i willed the phone to ring again . it didn’t . ❜
❛ don’t take the piss . i’m enjoying this . it’s making me feel better . ❜
❛ birds must be happy when they fly . ❜
❛ that weird plant must really like growing in sand . ❜
❛ evolution keeps on trucking until the end of time , which is never tomorrow , even though we all think it might be . ❜
❛ surely anything that existed and could think would find itself astonishing . ❜
❛ the placebo effect might not be the results of the patient’s mind , but your mind . ❜
❛ will you thank [ name ] for me when she gets back ? i’m too embarrassed to see anyone right now , especially her . ❜
❛ everyone’s got things they find hard to do . ❜
❛ she had her hands wrapped around her coffee as if it was the only source of warmth in her life . ❜
❛ i wanted to meet you again after that party , but i never did , and now i probably never will again , and it’s a shame , because i thought we could have been friends . ❜
❛ you know , not everyone is judging you . everyone’s got something that other people would think was awful if they knew . people like to attack the people who can’t or won’t hide , because that’s all part of their own camouflage . ❜
❛ i won’t ever come first for him , even though i’m the one who is there all the time , and i’m actually interested in him and his life . ❜
❛ he doesn’t mean to hurt my feelings , but he does , all the time , because he’s been put in this impossible position . ❜
❛ she has a nice big house , i imagine , and a cleaner , and nice furniture , and a husband and three lovely children , and that gives her the right to judge me , and decide how i should live . ❜
❛ i imagined being with [ name ] until we were both in our sixties and realized i’d probably rather shoot myself . ❜
❛ it was when i’d noticed the agelessness of his arms that i’d first realized he was a man , like any other man , and that he would also have feelings and memories and hopes and a heart and a naked body , just there under his clothes . ❜
❛ [ name ] told me he was going to tell [ name ] not to come round anymore . ❜
❛ you do look after me . sorry i’ve been a dick recently . ❜
❛ it’s so easy to start thinking that life is totally meaningless . ❜
❛ when i was a kid i thought death would happen to other people , but not to me . then when I grew up and realized it was inevitable for everyone , it was just such a fucking downer , you know ? ❜
❛ she’d even considered ruins , since , as she put it , she was already ruined herself . ❜
❛ don’t you think it’s interesting that people spent loads of time and money building structures for no reason other than to amuse themselves , or have something better than the neighbors , or so they could pretend to be living in the past , or in a fairy tale or something ? ❜
❛ was all that [ name ] , or was it just my idea of him ? ❜
❛ i just don’t want to go and play happy families with [ name ] and fucking [ name ] , of all people , especially when she’s shagging someone else . ❜
❛ i’m not into morally policing my friends . or my family , for that matter . ❜
❛ i wish i’d never told you any of that stuff now . i knew you’d find some way of using it against them . ❜
❛ if i sat there now , with so much life to contemplate , i felt that i might just watch the sea forever , and freeze with no fire and starve with no food . ❜
❛ i’m thinking about having an affair — which by the way will remain an affair even if i do leave [ name ] , because the , um , third party has got a partner as well . ❜
❛ you can’t really be in love with one person and officially living with another ; it has to be both at once . ❜
❛ i went through them all one by one after [ name ] rejected me . With the first three i convinced myself I was in love each time . ❜
❛ there was no conversation , but i understood , and he understood , that i’d had all his friends and now it was his turn . ❜
❛ i was wondering just what was so wrong with their relationship . it wasn’t just the harmonies and the easy conversation . ❜
