Alex

“I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with a inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“Yet I still wanted to end my life. No, that's not quite it. I felt like I had to end my life. To me, it had already seemed over. All those hopes and dreams I'd held so close to my heart had gone with everything else. In their place was a dark void from which I never thought I'd escape. My body might have been alive, but my soul was dead.”
― Riley Sager, The Only One Left

“It's easy for them to have opinions, and express them with confidence. They don't worry about appearing ignorant or conceited. They are not stupid people, but they're not so much smarter than him either. They just move through the world in a different way, and he'll probably never really understand them, and he knows they will never understand him, or even try.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life as happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People