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141 " He did gradually start to wonder why all their classroom discussions were so abstract and lacking in textual detail, and eventually he realised that most people were not actually doing the reading. They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read. He understands now that his classmates are not like him. It's easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. "
― Sally Rooney , Normal People
142 " Lately he’s consumed by a sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind. "
143 " People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy. "
― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends
144 " If she was different with Connell, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her personhood, but in between them, in the dynamic. "
145 " Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. "
― Sally Rooney , Beautiful World, Where Are You
146 " ... the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake. "
147 " She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life. "
148 " He was the first person I had met since Bobbi who made me enjoy conversation, in the same irrational and sensuous way I enjoyed coffee or loud music. "
149 " People who intentionally become famous - I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it - are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. "
150 " I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that- to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe. "
151 " Is it possible we could develop an alternative model of loving each other? "
152 " Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way. "
153 " He does have immaculate taste. He's sensitive to the most minuscule of aesthetic failures, in painting, in cinema, even in novels or television shows. Sometimes when Marianne mentions a film she has recently watched, he waves his hand and says: It fails for me. This quality of discernment, she has realised, does not make Lukas a good person. He has managed to nurture a fine artistic sensitivity without ever developing any real sense of right and wrong. The fact that this is even possible unsettles Marianne, and makes art seem pointless suddenly. "
154 " They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. "
155 " When I look back at those years, I feel touched and almost pained by the simplicity of the life I was living, because I knew what I had to do, and I did it, that was all. "
156 " Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he’s acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? "
157 " That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it "
158 " In that case we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something. "
159 " And hopefully I have changed, you know, as a person. But honestly, if I have, it's because of you. "
160 " She slipped out of my grasp like a thought. "