Top Highlights

• drama and significance, just ended like that with no conclusion, and it would never be picked back up again, never in the same way.
• 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.
• Connell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example.
• In just a few weeks’ time Marianne will live with different people, and life will be different. But she herself will not be different. She’ll be the same person, trapped inside her own body. There’s nowhere she can go that would free her from this. A different place, different people, what does that matter?
• He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that. It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’. In those words it almost sounds sexual. And in a way, the fe...