Normal People

by Sally Rooney

He carried the secret around like something large and hot, like an overfull tray of hot drinks that he had to carry everywhere and never spill.

forensic attentiveness

but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between 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.

His friends seem so obsessed with their own fathers, obsessed with emulating them or being different from them in specific ways.

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

It gave him a queasy feeling, to have this information about her, to be tied to her in this way.

white clouds like chalk dust over the library,

Unable to form such straightforward views or express them with any force, Connell initially felt a sense of crushing inferiority

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,

Mr. Knightley kisses Emma’s hand is not completely asexual, though its relation to sexuality is indirect. 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.

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

At midnight, sloppy drunk but hypocritically disgusted by the drunkenness of everyone around him,

she often feels there’s no limit to what her brain can do, it can synthesize everything she puts into it, it’s like having a powerful machine inside her head.

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.

For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside.

The sensation that he looked bad preoccupied him.

Connell’s initial assessment of the reading was not disproven. It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing.

All these years they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions. But in the end she has done something for him, she’s made a new life possible, and she can always feel good about that.