Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)

by Ali Smith

Sacha is deeply suspicious of forgiveness. The act of saying I forgive you, it’s like saying you are less than me and I have the moral or superior upper hand.

As a writer from the last century so devoutly said, Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

Sacha’s chest filled with the kind of warmth that once when she was really small she’d asked her mother about because it felt so nice and her mother’d said that’s your inner summer.

Since Sacha watched that TV show where celebrities dress up in costumes with huge masked heads and sing a song, and a panel and an audience try to guess who’s behind the mask, it has struck Sacha that actually everyone and everything on TV is like someone wearing a mask. After you’ve seen it, you can’t not see it.

Getting old is pathetic if you use it as an excuse for no longer being responsible.

Only the mighty Greta can upend the internet’s determination to make the word heroine refer not to a female hero but to a misspelling of a Class A drug. As if whoever was typing it in was bound to have meant heroin not heroine, heroine being such a little-used notion.

She imagines it all, all of the above, held in the palm of a giant hand. But whose hand? No one’s hand. Sacha’s own hand, now that she’s imagined it. No point in asking anyone else to hold your world.

It is as if since he turned thirteen a dark visor has come down over his eyes and he is looking out at everyone and everything through a metalled slit.

Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn’t be coincidence, would it?

The teacher: Look. It’s just a fact. A story about learning how to live and maturing into adulthood is called a Bildungsroman. Which is when the brick got thrown and the police got called.)

When two particles are entangled then a change to one no matter where the other particle is in the universe will mean there’s a change in the other. But how do the particles know? How do they know whether entanglement has or hasn’t taken place?

I have a vision that if you were to open a swift, metaphorically of course, the rolled-up message they carry inside them is the unfurled word SUMMER.

lockdown is nothing compared to the unfairness of life for people who are already being treated unfairly.

He said the word Ascot as if he were saying something made of glass and didn’t want his mouth cut.

Das kunstseidene Mädchen.