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She’ll often have to say things five or six times before he responds. This is not particular to Fly—she’s heard of parents hauling their children for hearing tests, the doctor saying witheringly, “There’s a difference between not being able to hear and not listening.”
He can feel himself getting into a state, a feeling of panic that renders him inactive when what he needs to do is hurry up.
Combined with luck, you can sometimes crack them that way. But not when you’re desperate, overloaded, and vaguely panicking.
There is little in modern life more paralyzing than the recliner chair.
“But children are only on loan,” Mrs. Ross is saying. “You can’t keep them.
so that he might realize what we feel…to love someone not because of what they do but because they are. That they exist is wonderful, they don’t have to do much more to make you proud.”
Is this political? Is it class? Is he stereotyping? A bit of all three and a gut response.
You think you can get hardened to it, but it has an effect on people, that culture. No one feels safe. You feel powerless.”
He’s always saying how it keeps the organization lean, keeps people sharp. I think the opposite is true. It makes people not-themselves, twisted with anxiety.
I flip-flop between varied feelings. I’m all up and down and side to side. I can be full of mean-spirited thoughts, like wanting Angel out of my flat, wanting to be alone yet needing her to stay. And when I feel happy, as soon as I notice it, then I’m not happy anymore. It’s like a fleeting ghost that disappears if you catch sight of it. One must notice happiness only by stealth, whistling, as if it doesn’t matter at all, which it doesn’t I suppose. I’m going off the point again, into generalities.
I think my favorite moments in the whole experience of living are just before a feed. The moment the crisp bag is opened. The moment the burger patty is laid on the bun. The way a roast potato tumbles gently from spoon to plate.
When you’re young you think happiness might be some kind of perpetual state of orgasm, but later, once the joints go, you realize it can be simulated with some cheese and a cracker.
But generally it’s the very rich screwing the very poor. Isn’t that how the world’s going? It’s separating, like oil from vinegar.
The Chinese are weird about sex, very embarrassed. Not much looking, lots of bowing. Then, once they get going, it’s hard to get them to stop. Guess that’s what they’re like in business too: relentless with a strong undercurrent of shame.
She’s reminded of the article she’d read only a day or two ago, about the teenage brain, how it is nothing like the adult brain. It is open and suggestible, an ideal sponge for learning but also in grave danger from risk-taking: that explorative impulse seemingly indiscriminate.
Children, essentially, are idiots, and teenagers are children driving adult bodies, while blindfolded by hormones.
He looks so wounded, she is struck by her failure. Our only job is to protect children from the shoddiness of adults and I’ve already failed.
When people demand of her an intimacy that she doesn’t feel, she must force her face into calm, suppressing the urge to flee.
“Don’t pile that on yourself,” says Bri. “Did you know, rates of postnatal depression are way higher with IVF babies? The pressure to love every minute. S’just not possible.”
it seemed to me that we live in an age of sanctimony—it is the fashion to pass judgment on people, to refuse to acknowledge context or accommodate nuance,
What would she think of herself, what would the world think, if she were to hurl her haggard self at Mark Talbot, lay her Francis Bacon body at his feet?
If she has a girl, she thinks now, laying a hand on the tight drum of her bump, she will try to inculcate her with a sense of rebellion. At the very least an ability to throw off the shackles of duty (unless, of course, that duty is to her own mother, in which case it should take precedence).
Obedience: Is it drummed into girls or is it hardwired?
Sometimes, he wants to tell Kim, life takes you down tributaries and it’s important to go with it—to allow the journey to an unknown destination. But Kim’s not the sort to deal in abstracts.
She remembers those moments of coming up against death and having to shock yourself with the permanence of it. The hollow sensation of actively loving a person who cannot love you back because they are dead. And wondering who you are, if the you who was loved by them isn’t being loved by them anymore.
His mother—a mood hoover at the best of times—harrumphing over some element of the domestic workload,
There’s an awful lot of sad desperation in extramarital sex.
For the first time in Manon’s life, she is not moving through the world alone.
We are our meanest selves.
Paradise, she thinks. Paradise is an internal place.
After a time it dawned on her that the world was full of catastrophically exhausted people on the borders of normal function—offices laden with zombie-parents who hadn’t slept in years, never mind weeks; cars being driven by ravaged adults with barely enough energy to find their shoes.
His faith in the meritocracy and the idea there might be an immutable space for him at work, that had ebbed, as he imagined it must for everyone except the most delusional or the most ruthless.
He worked for an organization, and organizations couldn’t love you back. Occasionally, you got an all-right boss, other times you got an arsehole. It was random.
anyone needed to learn about dogged persistence in the face of incompetence, they should spend time with a toddler. There is no greater grit than in the short-legged, nappied person who keeps on falling down.
We can all harm, all destroy; we can all create rifts, or make our hearts cold or tell ourselves it’s not our fault.
