My Favourite Lines from Normal People

 Normal People, Sally Rooney.

Started: 7 July 2022 | Finished: 11 July 2022

My favourite quotes:

She would have lain on the ground and let him walk over her body if he wanted, he knew that. (34)

Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone. (37)

It gave him a queasy feeling, to have this information about her, to be tied to her in this way. (52)

The smell of petrol infiltrates the car interior, heavy like a headache. (57)

Their life in Carricklea, which they had imbued with such drama & significance, just ended like that with no conclusion, and it would never be picked back up again, never in the same way. (77) 

Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than they exercising personal freedom for themselves (96)

When it rains, the city closes in, gathers around with mists; cars move slower, their headlights glowing darkly, and the faces that pass are pink with cold. (97)

She felt happy to be surrounded by people she liked, who liked her. (115)

She feels that even she doesn’t know what her family are like, that she’s never adequate in her attempts to describe them, that she oscillates between exaggerating their behaviour, which makes her feel guilty, or downplaying it, which also makes her feel guilty (117)

She laughs, a stupid laugh that doesn’t suit her. (131)

Marianne is the only one who ever triggers these feelings in him, the strange dissociative feelings, like he’s drowning and time doesn’t exist properly anymore. (133) 

Often he wished he could fall asleep inside her body. (133)

There’s something reassuring in how transparent he is to her. (138) 

She loves to be alone with him like this. It makes her life seem very manageable suddenly. (147) 

She feels a certain power over him, a dangerous power. (148) 

The cup in Marianne’s hand is too hot to hold, but instead of placing it down again she just lets the pain seep into her fingers, down into her flesh. (150)

Time softens out while he types (156)

It feels powerful to him to put an experience down in words, like he’s trapping it in a jar and it can never fully leave him. (157) 

That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it. (160)

The heat beats down on the back of Connell’s neck like the feelings of human eyes staring. (160) 

He senses a certain receptivity in her expression, like she’s gathering information about his feelings, something they have learned to do to each other over a long time, like speaking a private language. (161)

He’s not sure what friends are allowed to enjoy about each other. (162)

Cherries hang on the dark-green trees like earrings. (164)

Her hand hovers for a second as if she’s going to touch him, and then she doesn’t. (172)

The outside world touches against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside. (189) 

Would every stage of her life continue to reveal itself as the same thing, again and again, the same remorseless contest for dominance? (192)

It was true, Peggy and Jamie were not very good people; bad people even, who took joy in putting others down. (194)

Marianne feels aggrieved that she fell for it, aggrieved that she thought she had anything in common with them, that she’d participated in the commodity market they passed off as friendship. (194-5)

In bed at night she imagines scenarios in which she is completely free of her mother and brother, on neither good nor bad terms with them, simply a neutral non-participant in their lives. (195)

Her life is so sterile now and has no beauty in it anymore. (196)

Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake. (199)

He felt in awe of her naturalness, her easy way of moving through the world. (212)

They were attended only by people who wanted to be the kind of people who attended them. (219)

It was a nice thought, that he might not be suffering for nothing. (221)

Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything. (222)

If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed. (226) 

She feels pleasurably crushed by the weight of his power over her (235)

Time seems so elastic, stretched out by sound and motion. (236)

Sour heat, all over her skin and in her eyes. (238) 

No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt (262)

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I finished Normal People tonight, & I didn’t have the energy for a full review just yet (I also have a backlog of like 4 books I haven’t written up yet sooo). Instead, for now, here are my favourite lines that I underlined as I read.

Ellen Victoria

@artawaytheworld