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The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.
Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.
Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.
We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.
but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they? Don’t they have to be? Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated … from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: ‘But is your life as perfect as this?
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if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jim’s wife first met him, she would never
live with the stress of knowing that while their partner was in the bathroom, they could be swiping right or left and finding their soulmate? A whole generation would end up getting urinary tract infections because they had to keep waiting to pee until the charge on their partner’s phone ran out.
‘Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on aeroplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.’
That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height. Zara just wasn’t sure which of those she was: just because you don’t much like life doesn’t necessarily mean you want the alternative.
the ones who are completely different from us, but the ones who are almost no different at all. She used to travel abroad sometimes,
how greedy we are. Do you own an apartment?’
Then she thought about an American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
