Normal People

by Sally Rooney

He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said.

People would not necessarily think he had done well; some people might think he had gone very bad, while others would forget about him entirely.

What they had together was normal, a good relationship. The life they were living was the right life.

Suspect

There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.

In bed at night she imagines scenarios in which she is completely free of her mother and brother, on neither good nor bad terms with them, simply a neutral nonparticipant in their lives.

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.

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.