Hannah

“You think you aren't able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren't able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven't had a chance to do it yet. You're not special, you're just waiting.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“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.”
― Claire Keegan, Foster

“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.”
― Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

“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.”
― Anna Funder, Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life