Clever Girl Quotes

“But what if the novels were right? What if sentimentality was closer to the truth of life and cynicism was the evasion”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can’t re-enter it”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“It's painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“I’d lived all along as if I was acting out some turbulent drama; then I woke up one day and found I’d stopped believing in the play”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“I had worried sometimes about making the transition into being grown-up – how did you know when to begin? Now I understood that you stepped out into it, as simply as into a day”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“There’s a kind of freedom too, no doubt about it, in our being fifty. It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last.”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“We’d never seen him before: into the torpor of the suburb his footsteps broke like a signal for adventure on a jaunty trumpet.”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“Other grown-ups, especially women, had learned somehow to live on the surfaces of their bodies, controlling them and presenting a prepared version of them to the world.”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“The gracious thing to do was to accept the beauty of the opportunity if it was given”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“When you are young and strong you can be sure of springing free of your material envelope through your own vitality; later, any dinginess or fustiness may seep back into you”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“the substantial outward things that happened to people were more mysterious really than all the invisible turmoil of the inner life, which we set such store by. The highest test was not in what you chose, but in how you lived out what befell you”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“Sheila thought that passion was a story people dreamed up to save themselves from boredom”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I? What could I do; what could I become”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“If I was free, if I was just me, then what was I?”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“And then every so often, as if a switch flicked between two versions of myself, I suddenly wasn’t all right”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“And that was it. That’s how disaster comes, without any fanfare”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“He had actually liked me – liked the clear, light, energetic person he saw in me. (I think over time I’ve become more like that person”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“And it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to being loved”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“Some people accompany you like this in imagination, long after you’ve dropped any real connection with them”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“I was burning up with scorn for all of them – and I dreaded them too, because their lives were achieved and full beside my thwarted unfinished one”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“But I didn’t want there to be any silences, out of which raw truths might tumble”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl

“...we're wedged tight into the accident of our moment in history.”
― Tessa Hadley, Clever Girl