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1 " My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. "
― Sally Rooney , Mr Salary
2 " It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance. "
3 " Nothing inside my body was trying to kill me. Death was, of course, the most ordinary thing that could happen, at some level I knew that. Still, I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was. "
4 " Emotionally, I saw myself as a smooth, hard little ball. He couldn’t get purchase on me. I just rolled away. "
5 " We were predictable to each other, like two halves of the same brain. "
6 " My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. If he left my line of sight for more than a few seconds, I couldn’t even remember what his face looked like. "
7 " They hated each other and I mediated their mutual hatred in a way that made me feel successfully feminine. "
8 " These cells may look fairly normal, but they are not. "
9 " My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all. If he left my line of sight for more than a few seconds I couldn't even remember what his face looked like. I had read that infant animals formed attachments to inappropriate things sometimes, like falcons falling in love with their human breeders, or pandas with zookeepers, things like that. I once sent Nathan a list of articles about this phenomenon. Maybe I shouldn't have come to your christening, he replied. "
10 " If I happened to meet the woman the following morning, I would discreetly inspect her for any physical resemblance to myself. "
11 " When will we know if this was a bad idea or not? Should we already know? Because now it feels good "
12 " Sometimes on the phone he was his old self: complaining about parking tickets, or calling Nathan sarcastic names like 'Mr. Salary'. "
13 " At the time he worked for a start-up that developed 'behavioural software', which had something to do with feelings and consumer responsiveness. Nathan told me he only had to make people feel things: making them buy things came later in the process. At some point the company had been bought out by Google, and not they all made hilarious salaries and worked in a building with expensive hand dryers in the bathroom. "
14 " Whenever I saw her, she told me I was the apple of her son's eye, in those exact words. She had fastened on to this phrase, probably because it so lacked any sinister connotation. It would have been equally applicable to me if I had been Nathan's girlfriend or his daughter. "
15 " Before he was diagnosed with leukaemia, I had been toying with describing Frank as an 'abusive father' when the subject came up at campus parties. I felt some guilt about that now. He was unpredictable, but I didn't cower in terror of him, and his attempts at manipulation, though heavy, were never effective. I wasn't vulnerable to them. Emotionally, I saw myself as a smooth, hard little ball. He couldn't get purchase on me. I just rolled away. "
16 " I stared at him. I felt my body begin to go cold, or perhaps hot. Something happened to the temperature of my body that didn't feel good. "
17 " this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly "
18 " Since Frank was diagnosed eight week previously, I had spent my free time amassing an encyclopaedic knowledge of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. There was practically nothing left about it that I didn`t know. I graduated way past the booklets they printed for sufferers and onto the hard medical texts, online discussion groups for oncologists, PDFs of recent peer-reviewed studies. I wasn`t under the impression that this made me a good daughter, or even that I was doing it out of concern for Frank. It was in my nature to absorbe large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intelectuall dominance. "