Tina

“She wished she believed in heaven like the Catholics or life after death like the Muslims or reincarnation like the Buddhists. She wished she believed in anything at all.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“I just want to say, I’m on your side. I know I’ve never done anything to help you, Ivan, but in principle, in spirit. I’ve been on your side all along.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“For example, I do a little bit of data analysis, like I was saying. For tech companies mostly. They’ll give me a lot of data – say user experience data, like how long users spend on each section of a website – and I’ll spend a few hours making graphs and whatnot. Say it takes me – I don’t know, four hours to make these graphs, and I’ll pretend it took me ten hours, to get extra money. He glances over at her again, and adds: You might think that’s immoral, I don’t know. But anyway, never mind that for a second. The four hours that I actually spend making the graphs, and the ten hours that I get paid for: what is that? Like, any of that: what is it? At least when I worked as a delivery driver, I knew what I was doing. Someone wanted a Big Mac, and I brought it to them, and the amount I got paid was like, what it was worth to that person not to have to collect their own burger. The amount they will pay, not to leave the house, is the amount I will accept, yes to leave the house. Minus whatever the app is taking. If you get me. I get you. You’re making perfect sense. Oh good, he says. Because in the data analysis example, my question is, what is the money that’s being paid to me? It’s the money that the company will pay, to have their own information explained back to them in a graph. And how much money should that be? Clearly no one knows, because at the end I’ll make up a number of hours and they’ll just pay me for that number. I guess the graph is supposed to make the company more profitable, in theory, but no one knows by how much, it’s all made up.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

“To remember that God is not the nice man Jesus, who liked everybody and went around healing the sick; that God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems in Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad… Jesus is easy to love and God much harder.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo