Summer (Seasonal Quartet, #4)

by Ali Smith

To mark one week since Brexit they’ve all been made to write an essay on the subject of ‘Forgiveness’. 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.

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

Worrying about stuff like this was what her mother’s generation did as displacement activity from worrying about the real things happening in the world.

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.

Sacha quite likes words. She doesn’t really get to, though, at home, because Robert’s meant to be the one who likes words.

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

She thinks of those little cotton facemasks of now. They’re like nothing at all, dead leaves, blowaway litter, compared to the real masks, the ones on the faces of the planet’s liars. All manner of virulent things are happening.

every time I close my eyes all I see is people dying.

Why would we ever imagine that anything in the world takes a shape more important than the eye or the brain or the shape in the sky of a bird like that.