“Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.”
― Foster
― Foster
“We want people to be ‘decent’ and we want our writers to be too. Orwell engaged with this question of good work coming from flawed people. Does it also require doublethink to admire the work and ignore the behaviour of the private man? The question arises for him thinking about Dalí, Dickens and Shakespeare – and, tellingly, how they treated their wives.”
― Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
― Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
“Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view. Women are supporting cast – or caste. It is a story we all live in, so powerful that it has replaced reality with itself. We can see no other narrative for our lives, no roles outside of it, because there is no outside of it. In this fiction, the vanishing trick has two main purposes. The first is to make what she does disappear (so he can appear to have done it all, alone). The second is to make what he does to a woman disappear (so he can be innocent). This trick is the dark, doublethinking heart of patriarchy.”
― Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
― Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
“Progress isn't linear, though. If you plotted it onto a graph, it wouldn't be this straight line up towards happiness. It would wiggle backwards, then forwards, up and down. You might feel worse in a month from now than you did a few weeks after it happened. But that doesn't mean you're not healing. It just means that we all experience emotions at different times.”
― Notes on Heartbreak
― Notes on Heartbreak
“After this, I sat on the floor of the kitchen and thought about Leah, about the shape of her feet and the way she spoke about her father, the special voice she used to talk to cats, her kind frown, her intonation, her fingernails. ... I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved. ... Are you just now realising that people die, Leah had said to me when I voiced this thought, tucked up beside her on the sofa with my knees pressed tight into the backs of hers. Not people, I had said, just you.”
― Our Wives Under the Sea
― Our Wives Under the Sea
Hannah’s 2025 Year in Books
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