Normal People

by Sally Rooney

Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.

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

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

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

They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.

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.

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

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

Maybe I want to be treated badly, she says. I don’t know. Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.

Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence?

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.