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"His true existential condition was revealed as soon as he was dealing with books, ideas, lofty questions. At that moment, it became clear that he was unhappy only when his head was empty and he couldn't hid from himself what he had done to my mother and me. When, instead, he devoted himself to great thoughts supported by meticulously annotated books, he was happy, he lacked nothing."

“Or I imagine that he reasoned about the need to be truly fair, merciful, and faithful, without concealing unfairness, a hard heart, infidelity behind respect for conventions.”

“I hugged her as if I really did love her, and who knows, maybe I did, I no longer understood anything about my feelings.”

"Lies, lies, adults forbid them and yet they tell so many."

“What happened, in other words, in the world of adults, in the heads of very reasonable people, in their bodies loaded with knowledge? What reduced them to the most untrustworthy animals, worse than reptiles?”

“Sin exists: it’s when there’s no friendship, there’s no love, and you waste something good.”

"something that happened that very often occurred later in my life, sometimes bringing my relief, other times demoralizing me. The bond with known spaces, with secure affections, yielded to curiosity about what might happen."

"you don't belong only to your father and mother, you're mine too, you belong to the whole family that he came from, and anyone who belongs to us is never alone, is charged with energy."

"You see? Your father is like that. He's the only one who does good things, he can't accept that others do, too. And if you tell him it's not true, he erases you."

"Had Mariano merely been joking or, joking, had he cruelly spoken the truth?"

"I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption."

"and now she knew that she wasn't at all powerful and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent, and at most she could help only a few people. It was so much harder to reconcile herself to the ideal of helping a few, like she would rather help no one than do something so small and feeble."

"You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied, but by bullying someone else, you learn something you can never forget."

"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."

"their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches."

"Marianne felt aggrieved that she fell for it. Aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she had participated in the commodity market that they passed off as friendship."

"There's always been something inside her that men had wanted to dominate and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school, the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity. All with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality."

"He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity, without developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne and makes art seem pointless suddenly."

"for weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury, the outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside."

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

"it suggest to Conall, that the same imagination that he uses as a reader is necessary to understand real people also and to be intimate with them."

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

"'Its something to do with capitalism,' she said '
Yeah, everything is that's the problem isn't it.'"

"Conall always gets what he wants and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy."

"if she was different with Conall the difference was not happening inside herself, in her person, but in between them, in the dynamic."

"'Forget history. Forget legacy,' she said, and she wished she'd spent more time taking her own advice. She should've lived her life instead of running from the past. 'If what you actually want to do is rule, gods help you, then just accept that your kingdom is a giant cesspool of shit like everywhere else. Then you won't be afraid to take risks and make it better. And then maybe you'll fix some things.'"

"Her mother had always told her that keeping one's softness in the face of a world that was tough and callous was a strength unto itself. It struck her that her mother would've liked Alfie very much."

"It has been said that to teach is to touch the future. Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the wold."

"but the US model emphasizes transformation rather than reconciliation, because the root cause of racial hierarchy is no the result of conflict between groups; rather, it is built into the foundational governance structures of the nation."

"This decision was going to be his either way. He would depend on no drink or no person to hold him accountable. He would have to trust that who he was was enough to withstand this."