Normal People

by Sally Rooney

Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.

One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’.

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.

himself or create impressions about his personality. If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced.

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves,

Marianne replaces the yoghurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work – to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money. It’s time you’ll never get back, Marianne adds. I mean, the time is real. The money is also real. Well, but the time is more real. Time consists of physics, money is just a social construct.

To that I would venture that your decision-making is also a social construct.

That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it.

The whole idea of ‘meritocracy’ or whatever, it’s evil, you know I think that.

life so much worse here than it would be on the bed, or even in a totally different location? No, life is exactly the same. 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.

Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything. Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything. Four

Not for the first time Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

She considers this while he finishes his cup of coffee. I guess everyone is a mystery in a way, she says. I mean, you can never really know another person, and so on.

How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.