More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“but it’s a classic case of greenwashing.
I’ve always struggled with earnest people; as someone of few moral convictions and the ethical depth of a spoon, I tend to have very little in common with them.
jeans that had gone way past distressed and looked frankly distraught.
It just felt as though sometimes, in trying to improve matters, we accidentally made things worse. By “we” I meant humanity, not specifically myself. Although also myself.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It sounded Russian and was about five thousand pages long. I groaned and opened the first page: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. OK, well this was acceptably cynical. Twenty pages later I was hooked. It was great!
Well, of course it is!
Raven sat cross-legged, cocooned in silver foil like a giant Hershey’s Kiss.
It’s good to have a friend who is morally superior to you in almost every respect—it gives you someone to look up to, someone to hold you accountable, someone to lie to on a regular basis.
while their offspring communed with nature, often by eating it.
She brushed some crumbs off a chair, inspected it, then laid a muslin over it before sitting down.
Like why is she even friends with Hen? She looks down on Alice, insults her, albeit subtlely, and is ungrateful.
Who empties the fridges of the deceased?
Good question.
the dogs were already done and hastening into the woods to find something gross to roll in. The romantic life of dogs is truly a thing of wonder.
there was something going on between Myers and Leila.
What if Leila was actually a corporate spy on the environmentalist group?
seemed pretty modest up until the point at which he had invented the wind-solar hybrid charge controller for his wind turbines.
Are we having an Elon Musk / Tesla thing here?
Several pod-shaped chairs hung on long chains from the ceiling,
Like swings? 🤨
As seemed to be Aether’s way, it looked like a standard office had been hijacked by Teletubbies.
OMG. It's AAA!!
could it be the reclusive Owen Myers above our heads?
That anonymous dude is totally going to be Owen.
soon we would be limited to 7 P.M. bedtimes and quality adult time would be relegated to quarterly evenings in the pub which we would spend discussing how very tired we were.
he began rather pompously. “Marx said that—” We were spared the promised Marxist lecture as the door banged open and Maya breezed in, swathed head to toe in the products of capitalism and bringing with her zero fucks about Marx or what he’d said about cities.
Awesome phrasing. It's Marx, I know, but still.
the bit of detecting I hated, having to suspect people of doing the most heinous of things. Generally speaking, I’m predisposed to quite like most people. I find it extremely socially awkward then suspecting them of murder.
opened a super-oaty fruit-plus
I still stand by my pre-parenthood statement that watching your children sleep is creepy. However this absolutely does not mean I don’t do it.
pegged me as some sort of ringleader. I have never been a ringleader in my life. I’m barely even in the ring.
I’d never realized before parenting that tiredness was an emotion. Or at least, that it was capable of overwriting pretty much every single emotion.
I’m a terrible influence on people. But sometimes they need it.
“Alice you really are…” Inspector Harris bit off her comment, which was a shame. I’d have quite liked to know what I really am.
“So that’s her motive, but what could she have been blackmailing him over?” I asked.
Or maybe she was a mole in the activist group and the money was payoff
Richard laid a gentle hand on my elbow and began steering me through the crowd. I hate it when men do this; it has the guise of a gentlemanly gesture, but really they’re just controlling you.
I was well aware of how people underestimated me, and in all honesty I often enjoyed it, and it could be very useful at times.
They'll never see you coming.
“Oh, I’m just nosy,” I said cheerfully.
“Personality flaw.” I shrugged. I had a lot of them and found them a very useful get-out clause.
The real-life Owen Myers was much smaller than I’d imagined, as often seems to be the case.
I’d been surprised to realize that I had made friends here. Genuine friends. The sort who would drive over to your house at 3 A.M. with a baby thermometer because yours was broken (edit: you’d never bought one but didn’t want to admit it). Or babysit your child despite having two of their own to look after as a single parent. Or kindly but honestly tell you that pink cord dungarees are never going to work for you.
Norah had, of course, brought a Tupperware of homemade cookies.
Is it her maybe??
On the other, it gave me a strange feeling deep inside, in my very core, an almost melancholy. If Jack fed for too long, like he was this evening, the feeling swelled and grew and threatened to overwhelm me.
THE HEAT THE next day had reached almost unbearable levels. It felt as though the air was closing in around me, pressing on my eyeballs, constricting my skull.
I just don't get living without central air.
When we see a person, we read the labels they present to us: activist, rich kid, “mum.”
As I raced (at a sensible 25 mph) through the countryside,
I had pretended everything was normal. We have to continue as if the world is normal, because most of the time it is. Because if we realized that normal people can do horrific things, that anyone can break the boundaries, that a single act can tip you from regular person to killer … that the skin of normality, of order, that stretches over everything is terrifyingly thin … well, I suspect we would all go mad.
