Normal People

by Sally Rooney

But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.

He finds himself crossing things out in his journal as if he imagines some future person poring over it in detail, as if he wants the future person to know which ideas he has thought better of.

He was like a freezer item that had thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid.

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.

It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different.