Normal People

by Sally Rooney

To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward.

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. But what are we supposed to do, give back the scholarship money? I don’t see what that achieves.

He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly.

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.

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