62
" Después del segundo rechazo, me reafirmé en mi decisión de no sentirme mal por él cuando me habló de "nuestra afinidad", fruto de "nuestra renegancia", mencionó nuestra relación sin que esta existiese, y entonces me di cuenta de que trataba mis desaires como si no lo fueran, como si de hecho contasen como primeras citas. En cuanto a sus modales de acosador y a lo seguro que estaba de nuestra relación y del futuro de nuestra unión, yo jamás habría imaginado que los perturbados, ilusos, obsesivos y amenazadores del mundo pudieran recuperarse al instante de ser perturbados, ilusos, obsesivos y amenazadores y dar marcha atrás como si se acabase el mundo hasta plantarse en la adulación y la oscuridad. "
― Anna Burns , Milkman
65
" Okay,’ I said. ‘So if I were to stop walking-while-reading, and hands in pockets, and little night torches, and instead looked right and left and right again for dangerous, unscrupulous forces, does that mean I’ll end up happy?’ ‘It’s not about being happy,’ he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I’ve ever heard. "
― Anna Burns , Milkman
66
" It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be. "
― Anna Burns , Milkman
68
" At the same time I dismissed a strange bodily sensation that had run the lower back half of my body, during which the base of my spine had seemed to move. It had moved. Not a normal moving as in forward bends, backward bends, sideways and twistings. This had been a movement unnatural, an omen of warning, originating in the coccyx, with its vibration then setting off ripples – ugly, rapid, threatening ripples – travelling into my buttocks, gathering speed into my hamstrings
from where, inside a moment, they sped to the dark recesses behind my knees and disappeared. This took one second, just one second, and my first thought – unbidden, unchecked – was that this
was the underside of an orgasm, how one might imagine some creepy, back-of-body, partially convulsive shadow of an orgasm – an anti-orgasm. "
― Anna Burns , Milkman