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141 " Just because I have a beautiful face doesn’t mean I’m a narcissist. "
― Sally Rooney , Conversations with Friends
142 " I’m going to become so smart that no one will understand me. "
143 " she just said: sex with men, how weird "
144 " What does that mean? said Bobbi. Don’t let them in unless they’ve got a medical degree? "
145 " Never get married, Frances, she said. Nick laughed and said: Frances would never lower herself to such a bourgeois institution. "
146 " When we came out of the theater it was raining again. I felt pure and tiny like a newborn baby. Philip put up his umbrella and we walked toward his bus stop while I sort of grinned manically at nothing and touched my own hair a lot. "
147 " That's intense, he said. Thank you for saying that. I have to laugh now or I'm going to start crying. "
148 " I isolated myself from criticism so I could behave badly without losing my sense of righteousness. "
149 " I sat staring at my laptop screen until it went black. 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. These thoughts were not unusual for me. "
150 " I want that coat, I said. Oh, yeah. You can’t have it. "
151 " Sometimes when I was doing something dull, like walking home from work or hanging up laundry, I liked to imagine that I looked like Bobbi. She had better posture than I did, and a memorably beautiful face. The pretence was so real to me that when I accidentally caught sight of my reflection and saw my own appearance, I felt a strange, depersonalising shock. "
152 " Philip was plainly pretty enthused about working for the agency, and though I didn’t judge him for making life plans, I felt like I was more discerning with my enthusiasms. "
153 " this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen. "
154 " Linda told me mochas were ‘complicated "
155 " I was happy he said that, because it was what I wanted him to think, and because I thought he really knew that and was just kidding around. "
156 " On dry days, Bobbi and I walked along underused paths, kicking leaves and talking about things like the idea of landscape painting. Bobbi thought the fetishization of untouched nature was intrinsically patriarchal and nationalistic. "I like like houses better than fields," I observed. "They're more poetic, because they have people in them. "
157 " You underestimate your own power so you don’t have to blame yourself for treating other people badly. You tell yourself stories about it. Oh "
158 " She pronounced Liese's name without any particular love or hatred, just a girl she had known, and for months afterwards, maybe forever afterwards, I was afraid that someday she would say my name that way too. "
159 " I loved when he was available to me like this, when our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together, or a long private joke that nobody else could understand. "
160 " At best they're very morally ambiguous.Aren't we all? I said. "