Home > Work > Conversations with Friends
1 " You can love more than one person, she said. That's arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You're friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don't really value me? I don't have other friends, I said. "
― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends
2 " I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible. "
3 " Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine. "
4 " I wasn’t used to being attacked like this and it was frightening. I thought of myself as an independent person, so independent that the opinions of others were irrelevant to me. Now I was afraid that Nick was right. I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness. "
5 " I lay there in the bath not thinking, not doing anything. After a few seconds, I heard her open the front door, and then her voice saying: she's had a really rough day, so just be nice to her. And Nick said: I know, I will. I loved them both so much in this moment that I wanted to appear in front of them like a benevolent ghost and sprinkle blessings into their lives. Thank you, I wanted to say. Thank you both. You are my family now. "
6 " Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one the unkind ones. "
7 " I need to be fun and likeable, I thought. A fun person would send a thank-you email. "
8 " A school of taxis and cars swam past "
9 " Yeah, I said. If there's one thing you can say for fascism, it had some good poets. "
10 " At the same time I was exhilarated by the seriousness of my pain, like it might change my life in an unforeseen way. "
11 " Something being over is not the same as something never having happened. "
12 " When I read the Bible I picture you as Jesus, so maybe fainting in a church was a metaphor after all. "
13 " Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful "
14 " Gradually, the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. "
15 " Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. "
16 " I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it. Suffering wouldn't make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn't make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. "
17 " Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position. "
18 " You underestimate your own power so you don't have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. "
19 " Everyone’s always going through something, aren’t they? That’s life, basically. It’s just more and more things to go through. "
20 " Things matter to me more than they do to normal people, I thought. I need to relax and let things go. I should experiment with drugs. "
