If you're looking for unbecoming quotes, here's the first, from chapter 3 of Unbecome: "Every answer I reached for came back with a tag on it, and every tag named an audience." Twelve more from my book follow, each checked word for word against its text and given with its place in the book and a sentence of context.
Clemence has the card propped against the fruit bowl and the pen uncapped when she stops.
Her running partner from the Thursday group is moving to Muscat at the end of the month, and Clemence wants one line inside the card: a sentence from a novel they both read years ago, one she's quoted at so many dinners that it feels like her own. She could write it with her eyes shut.
She fetches the novel anyway. It's on the bottom shelf, its spine cracked white, and she finds the page on the third try.
The sentence is there. Two of its words aren't the ones she's been saying. And the sentence just before it, which she'd forgotten altogether, turns her favourite line from advice into a small joke the narrator makes at his own expense.
She copies both sentences into the card, exactly as printed. The real version is funnier than hers, and kinder.
What are the best quotes from Unbecome?
The thirteen lines here are the ones I'd point to first, because each makes sense on its own. Every quote has been checked against the book's text, word for word, the way Clemence checked hers, and each comes with its chapter, or the opening letter, and a sentence on where it sits. They're grouped by what they're about.
I've kept to lines that hold up without the story around them. Where a line runs to two sentences or more, you'll find all of it here, uncut.
If you came here for the un-becoming line that gets passed around online, it isn't from Unbecome. It has an article to itself, and that piece is the place for it.
Which lines are about the faces people wear?
The opening quote comes from chapter 3, The Masks at the Dining Table, which looks at the selves we put on for other people. Part of the chapter covers one ordinary morning in South Africa, years ago, when a question about who I was got to me before the alarm did. That quote is where my answers ended up: my name, my work and everything else I tried turned out to point at somebody watching.
Later in the chapter comes a line about faces I was still putting on for audiences that had long since left the room: "The performer had outlived every reason for the performance."
Chapter 12 looks at people whose lives seem in good order from outside. One of its plainest lines: "Shutters read as calm from the street."
Lines about masks can land close to home. Some of them may sit close to something painful for you; a doctor, a therapist or someone you trust is the right person to tell. If you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services.
The masks in those lines have a free quiz to go with them: Who Did You Become to Survive? Or read on.
Which lines are about reading and stories?
The book opens with A Letter Before the First Door. It mentions a question waiting at a door a few pages on, and says of that question: "The kind that takes a moment to read and a life to answer."
The same letter makes a request about pace. The book is short on purpose, it says, and then: "It is built to be walked through, never raced through."
Chapter 1, A Lion Among Sheep, opens on an old fable. Partway through, I describe the quiet that falls in a room when I tell it, and what I think goes on underneath: "A story slides in under the floor of the house, below the rooms where we keep our arguments, and does its quiet arithmetic down there in the dark, and all you hear of it upstairs is a far-off sound that could almost be furniture being moved."
Every chapter gets a short outline in my Unbecome book summary.
Which lines are about reactions that feel too big?
One weekday afternoon outside a café, a man I know well lost his temper with a waiter over a small spill. That story opens chapter 7, You Are Feeling Your Thinking, and the chapter reads it like this: "My friend's week had not filled that cup. His week was only the last pour."
Still at the café, the chapter names the pattern behind it: "The casting changes. The play does not."
Further on, the chapter names that gap plainly: "The size of the moment and the size of the wave do not match."
Anger that leaves anyone afraid or harmed, the angry person included, needs more than a quote. If your own temper worries you, speak to your doctor or a mental health professional. If someone else's temper is what you live with, call the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children on 800111, which costs nothing and answers day and night; outside the UAE, a local service for people living with abuse can help. If anyone is in danger, contact your local emergency services.
Which lines are about worth and effort?
Chapter 9, Unbecoming Is Not Self-Improvement, expects that some readers will want to do all of this well, and it answers that wish directly: "This is not a performance. It is a permission."
Chapter 13, The Twenty-Dollar Bill, starts with a bill held up in a seminar room and turns to worth, and whether anyone needs to earn it. It follows the bill's value through everything that happens to the paper: "Twenty at the printing. Twenty in the wallet. Twenty under the shoe. Twenty in the gutter, in the rain, the night somebody lost it. Twenty."
Further into the chapter: "Nobody audits gravity in the morning to see whether they still qualify for it."
A few paragraphs after that, it puts the point in two sentences: "The universe keeps one receipt on you, and one is all it needs. You are here."
For how worth differs from the way we rate ourselves, see self-worth vs self-esteem.
How do you check a line you've been carrying?
This isn't therapy or medical care, and nothing in it replaces any treatment. If you're in treatment, keep working with your doctor or therapist, and if you're in crisis, contact your local emergency services. Choose a line you'd happily quote over dinner; words that someone once used to hurt you don't belong in it.
Plenty of people carry a line like Clemence's, half remembered and said with full confidence. Here's how to give one of yours the same test.
- Pick a line you quote often. From a book, a film or a song, something you've said aloud more than once, with nothing painful attached to it.
- Write it down from memory. Word it exactly as you'd say it across a table.
- Find the original. Open the book, or play the song or the scene.
- Read it in its own company. Take in the sentence before it and the one after, then set the original words beside yours.
A line can carry more than its words, and your doctor, or someone you trust, is the person for anything extra it carries.
What gets lost when a line leaves its page?
A list like this keeps a line's words and loses most of what was around them. Three things the book gives back:
- The pages around each line. I've given every quote here one sentence of context. In the book, each one has everything that leads up to it.
- The stories they come from. Leo and the flock, a morning in South Africa, a spilled coffee, a twenty-dollar bill and a roomful of raised hands.
- A pace of its own. The opening letter asks you to read slowly, and the book is short enough to let you.
On the book's page, the choice between copies comes down to this: "One is faster. One is cheaper."
Gravity is the one law I've never fact-checked.
Rayyan's take on Unbecome went up on Amazon. "If self-improvement has stopped working for you, this explains why."
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.
P.S. Clemence's line read better with the sentence before it. These thirteen have whole pages around them. Get The Paperback