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61 " I didn’t feel with her, like I did with many other people, that while I was talking she was just preparing the next thing she wanted to say. "
― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends
62 " I like getting compliments where I don't have to make eye contact with the person "
63 " I was appropriating my fear of total disappearance as a spiritual practice. I was inhabiting disappearance as something that could reveal and inform, rather than totalise and annihilate. "
64 " didn’t know how to join in their new friendship without debasing myself for their attention. "
65 " I’m bettering myself, I thought. I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me. "
66 " She said she found religious occasions, like funerals or weddings, ‘comforting in a kind of sedative way’. They’re communal, she said. There’s something nice about that for the neurotic individualist. "
67 " These were the kind of things I wrote about in my diary as a teenager: as a feminist I have the right to not love anyone. "
68 " That sounds like a recipe for disastrous unhappiness, I said. You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy. "
69 " You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position. "
70 " 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. I applied for jobs and turned up for seminars. Things went on. "
71 " But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love. "
72 " You could die, I thought, and it was a nice relaxing thought at the time. I imagined death like a switch, switching off all the pain and noise, cancelling everything. "
73 " At this point I felt a weird lack of self-recognition, and I realised that I couldn't visualise my own face and body at all. It was like someone had lifted the end of an invisible pencil and just gently erased my entire appearance "
74 " I was like an empty cup, which Nick had emptied out, and now I had to look at what had spilled out of me: all my delusional beliefs about my own value and my pretensions to being a kind of person I wasn’t. While I was full of these things I couldn’t see them. Now that I was nothing, only an empty glass, I could see everything about myself. "
75 " You’re twenty-one, said Melissa. You should be disastrously unhappy. "
76 " Since when have you loved me? I said. Since I met you, I would think. If I wanted to be very philosophical about it, I’d say I loved you before then. "
77 " Bobbi thinks depression is a humane response to the conditions of late capitalism. "
78 " I tried to make myself think about things logically. Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no material reality. "
79 " I concluded that some kinds of reality have an unrealistic effect, which made me think of the theorist Jean Baudrillard, though I had never read his books and these were probably not the issues his writing addressed. "
80 " Who even gets married? said Bobbi. It’s sinister. Who wants state apparatuses sustaining their relationship? "