Beautiful World, Where Are You

by Sally Rooney

remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse—we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.

Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently.

And now I just feel like the kind of person whose life partner would fall out of love with them after several years, and I can’t find a way not to be that kind of person anymore.

At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions.

I think if every man who had ever behaved somewhat poorly in a sexual context dropped dead tomorrow, there would be like eleven men left alive.

Do you ever feel, when someone does something nice for you, it’s like you’re so grateful that you actually start feeling bad?

There was something delicate about living like that—like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.