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Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.
He certainly didn’t tell anyone in school about it, that he had seen her in a bathrobe, or that she looked flustered, it wasn’t anyone’s business to know.
Respecting one's privacy
Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.
Maybe it denotes the level of loneliness
Megan Maguire liked this
side. It seemed so obviously insane to her then that she should have to dress up in a costume every morning and be herded around a huge building all day, and that she wasn’t even allowed to move her eyes where she wanted, even her eye movements fell under the jurisdiction of school rules.
Thoughts about school 🤣🤣
She doesn’t mind you cleaning their house but she doesn’t want your son hanging around with her daughter?
She reads long articles about Syria and then researches the ideological backgrounds of the journalists who have written them.
It is important to know the ideological background ,so that we can't get biased.
She believes Marianne lacks ‘warmth’, by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.
Is it really important?
He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they’re not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.
Even i think this too 🙃🙃
It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’.
Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves,
someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward.
In Sweden we have a saying, he says. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.
Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.
It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.
