Evenings and Weekends Quotes

“He never knows what he wants. It changes completely from minute to minute, and he has no decisive inner voice that says 'This is the real you, this is what you desire.' Ed is blurry, to even himself. His outlines are vague. This is fine except that you need to be solid for other people. To have relationships, to be trusted, you have to say, 'This is me, this is what I want' and act as if that were true at all times.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Even when she wants something, her first instinct is to say that she doesn't.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“I feel like living in London is like being on the constant verge of an orgasm but never being able to cum. Do you know what I mean? It’s not that you’re not turned on. It’s not that you aren’t having a lovely time. But something deep down inside your body won’t allow for it no matter how hard you try.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He's grieving for the dad he could have been, and the dad he never had, and the dad that he DID have, and his ten-year relationship, and his life in London, and his entire sense of identity. Ed is grieving for so many versions of himself that it's hard to look at the Ed that does exist...”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“She struggles with anything that involves a gathering of people, a voicing of feeling. It's not that she doesn't have feelings of her own, but as soon as they're spoken aloud, they sound false, and she's afraid of revealing something bad about herself.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He doesn’t want his feelings to matter. He doesn’t want to change his name, or his life, and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all. He doesn’t want to be seen as a man, or a woman, or a non-binary person. What Ed wants is to be invisible. What Ed wants is to disappear entirely. He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“There is too much to say and no way to say it. It's impossible for anyone to describe the detail of their life, the minute-to-minute transition from one thought to the next, and unless you speak to a person on a regular basis, how can you know what their life is like? You can't.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“With Ed, she could simply unfurl. She still can. In all other parts of her life, she's a performer.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Too often, the city is no more than a grim backdrop for morning and evening commutes, the work hours sandwiched between, but this quest has turned it into a playground for exploration...”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Looking back now, she had no interest in 'feeling' anything; rather, she was young and and insecure and grasping frantically for the makings of a personality...”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“She has always imagined that if she had five minutes left on earth, she’d call the person she loved most and tell them all the things she needed them to know. But most goodbyes are small. They take place in the middle of stations and shopping centres, where there’s too much going on to really focus on the goodbye at all, distracted by the counter-terrorism alerts blaring from the station loudspeakers, and the queue for Greggs that snakes through the concourse.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Sometimes, she has stood at the base of the pit and shouted for help. Sometimes, she has stood at the base of the pit and whispered for help, too, and felt hurt and abandoned when no one responded because her whispers were too soft to audible to anyone but herself.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Phil struggles to relax. Whenever he looks at art or nature with friends, he feels obliged to express feelings on it even when he has none, and this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He is always ready to be awed. He takes the world as it comes, luxuriating in the uncomplicated pleasures of glorious weather and witnessing a rare animal in the flesh.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Why was it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“She was angry at them for not knowing Pauline. They wouldn’t have known her even if Rosaleen described her with the best words she knew.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“She doesn't make art any more. She just socializes in proximity to it.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“that was the thing with words: you only knew they were the wrong ones once you’d already said them, and by that time it was too late.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He wishes he saw her more often, but friendship in London means bumping into each other once or twice a year, saying you need to hang out more, and never doing anything about it.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“It's a tense summer. It's June. Dehydrated office workers spew from Tube station with frayed nerves and anxiety. On every beautiful day, people feel compelled to look out their window and say, 'It's very worrying, isn't it?' as if it were tasteless to comment on the warm sun and blue sky without remarking on the mass extinction of humans and whales within the same breath. The air is warm and damp. No bedsheet is un-drenched, and everything, everywhere is sticky with sweat. The hours of each day are rationed between unbearable heat and biblical rain, and even though it has only been this way for three weeks, it is impossible to imagine that things have been any other way. People move slowly, if they move at all, and no one has thought a coherent thought all month.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Her advice to Ed, if he sought it, which he won't - would be that he's younger than he thinks. By the time he dies, his life will change more than he could imagine, and even though this is a particularly hard time - for both of them- they can weather it together.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Valerie knows how it feels to move through life's motions, responding to events as they happen, and then, one day, without intention, you've found yourself miles from where you started, with no way to return.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Rosaleen makes herself smaller and smaller to the point of barely existing at all.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“... and she never told anyone in Ireland that London was exciting. She never told them that she liked the crowds, the way they surged around and made so many things seem possible. Even if nothing ever actually happened, it never stopped feeling likely, inevitable, that your life was about to change, if you turned a street corner, struck up a conversation, got off the Tube a few stops early to see what the buildings looked like in Willesden Green or Clapham Common.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Their wordlessness is a symptom of their intimacy, so attuned to each other that they are beyond verbal language altogether. Barely saying a word, these two are understood.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Sometimes, she wonders why she and Ed couldn’t settle together into a sexless but pleasant marriage. Hadn’t that been what their grandparents did, and their grandparents before that? Why was it that her generation had to demand transformation, sex, adventure, comfort, stability, romance, conversation, intimacy, all from the one person? What’s so bad about settling?”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“She holds his gaze but doesn’t smile back. The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“He thinks of himself as a good communicator. He thinks of himself as having transcended the stereotype of men as being unable to describe their feelings. But around his family he becomes the most repressed of all, like the sad old patriarchs who were brought up to believe that the strength of society relies on their continued silence.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends

“Baby grows, breast milk, pregnancy yoga: suburban, normie, boring. Ketamine, harnesses, being in a polycule: vanguard of the revolution.”
― Oisín McKenna, Evenings and Weekends