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Marianne is grinning now. She exercises an open contempt for people in school.
People resent that about her, and Connell thinks that’s why they tell the story, as a way of gawking at something they’re not allowed to see.
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.
His figure was like a long elegant line drawn with a brush.
He told her she should try reading The Communist Manifesto, he thought she would like it, and he offered to write down the title for her so she wouldn’t forget.
anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.
Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.
He tells her that she’s beautiful. She has never heard that before, though she has sometimes privately suspected it of herself, but it feels different to hear it from another person.
His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I’m not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she’s aware of this now, while it’s happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. 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.
In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this.
It suggests to Connell that the same imagination he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also, and to be intimate with them.
He was really laughing then. Marianne, he said, I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.
Well, best of luck to them. May the revolution be swift and brutal.
like their solitude is a narcotic.
It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him.
It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.
Stars flicker and cast no light.
Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.
he might not be suffering for nothing.
