“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”
Work
"Stephen Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion.
Quotes
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Stephen Fry
Canonical work source
“No adolescent ever wants to be understood, which is why they complain about being misunderstood all the time.”
“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I w...”
“It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.”
“Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on...”
“I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I pos...”
“Sex without smiling is as sickly and as base as vodka and tonic without ice.”
“People who can change and change again are so much more reliable and happier than those who can’t”