Dina Khatib’s Reviews > Normal People > Status Update

“to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.”

“with other people she seemed so independent and remote, but with Connell she was different, a different person. He was the only one who knew her like that.”

“Eventually she laughed, because she wasn’t totally without spirit, and it’s obviously was kind of funny, just how savagely he had humiliated her, and his inability to apologize or even admit he had done it.”

“She applies some lotion to her left arm and then, quietly, lies back down in the deckchair, face to the sun, and closes her eyes. Behind her eyelids waves of light move green and red.”

“He didn’t know what to say. He started telling her that he loved her. It just happened like drawing your hand back when you touch something hot.”

“He often makes blithe remarks about things he ‘wishes’… if he really wished for any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feel sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy.”

“Lately he’s consumed by the sense that he is in fact two separate people, and soon he will have to choose which person to be on a full-time basis, and leave the other person behind.”

“He carried the secret around like something large and hot, like an overfull tray of hot drinks that he had to carry everywhere and never spill.”

“She just let things happen, like nothing meant anything to her.”

“He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This surprised her, because she usually felt confined inside one single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said.”