Normal People

by Sally Rooney

This “what?” question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.

I would never pretend not to know you, Connell.

Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.

Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.

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.

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

Marianne lacks “warmth,” by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.

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.

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

Connell Waldron! From beyond the grave.

I don’t feel lovable. I think I have an unlovable sort of…I have a coldness about me, I’m difficult to like.

I’m not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.

feeling a strange sense of nostalgia for a moment that was already in the process of happening.

Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.

that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world.

What kind of person would he be if it happened now? Someone very different? Or exactly the same person, himself, with no difference at all.

Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?

Connell feels profoundly and almost unendurably alienated from his own body.

But that was their world then.

He had just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing. It was Marianne who had shown him other things were possible.

I can never get that life back.

We can’t change your circumstances, but we can change how you respond to your circumstances.

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

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.

It gives Marianne a window onto real happiness, though a window she cannot open herself or ever climb through.

I guess we misunderstood each other.

buried in the earth of her body.

But deep down she knows she is a bad person, corrupted, wrong, and all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things, these efforts only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.

He feels like he has ruined the life of everyone who has ever even marginally liked him.

effortless tyranny over someone who seems, to other people, so invulnerable.

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.

What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.