Sabby’s Reviews > Sorrow and Bliss > Status Update

“Even the women who get those things lose them again. Husbands die and children grow up and marry someone you hate and use the law degree you bought them to start an Etsy business. Everything goes away eventually, and women are always the last ones standing so we just make up something else to want.”

“I told him about the time I had lifted a terracotta pot and shattered it against the garden wall. I told him about smashing my phone so many times against the kitchen tiles that pieces of glass got in my hand, about throwing the hairdryer at Patrick, the bruise it left, about driving my car on purpose into a metal guard rail in a car park, about standing with my back to the wall and banging my head over and over

“There are things, crimes in a marriage, that are so great you cannot apologise for them”

About smudgy smile in Mona Lisa painting……😂 “I asked her how they knew that but she said she couldn’t remember, something to do with a shadow he put on her neck, to do with some gland that only sticks out when you’re pregnant, and I should just Google it later.”

“The kind of people who clamoured to tell you they had some sort of psychological disorder were, in his experience, either boring and desperate to seem interesting, or unable to accept that they were fucked up in some ordinary way, probably by their own hand and not because of the childhood they were equally in a rush to tell you about”

“My perception of Winsome belonged to my mother – I thought of her as old, punctilious, someone without an interior life or worthwhile passions. That was the first time I saw her for myself. Winsome was an adult, someone who took care, who loved order and beauty and laboured to create it as a gift to other people.”