Conversations with Friends

by Sally Rooney

They took her radical politics as a kind of bourgeois self-deprecation, nothing very serious, and talked to her about restaurants or where to stay in Rome.

Will you die if you can’t have me? I said. And he said: yes.

you have to do more than say you’re anti things

you have a communist intuition

You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy.

I realized my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would.

It was hard to believe that such a perfect creature was dependent on the whims of adults who drank soda water and handed her to strangers at parties.

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.