Sara’s Reviews > Normal People > Status Update

"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."

"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."