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Normal People

Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him. — location: 127

Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn’t make him happy. — location: 470

Her gaze unsettles him like it used to, like looking into a mirror, seeing something that has no secrets from you. — location: 1150

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. — location: 1493

To be known as her boyfriend plants him firmly in the social world, establishes him as an acceptable person, someone with a particular status, someone whose conversational silences are thoughtful rather than socially awkward. — location: 2211

It’s like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That’s money, the substance that makes the world real. There’s something so corrupt and sexy about it. — location: 2271

Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. — location: 2401

There’s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. — location: 2706

Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything. — location: 3115

It gives Marianne a window onto real happiness, though a window she cannot open herself or ever climb through. — location: 3189

Still, he would lie down and die for her at any minute, which is the only thing he knows about himself that makes him feel like a worthwhile person. — location: 3478

He has sincerely wanted to die, but he has never sincerely wanted Marianne to forget about him. That’s the only part of himself he wants to protect, the part that exists inside her. — location: 3490

How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary. No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not. — location: 3675