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Beautiful World, Where Are You?
by Sally Rooney

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“...Studies show that in the last couple of years, people have been spending a lot more time reading the news and learning about current affairs. It has become normal in my life, for example, to send text messages like the following: Tillerson out at state lmaoooo. It just strikes me that it really shouldn’t be normal to send texts like that.

Anyway, as a consequence, each day has now become a new and unique informational unit interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before.

…The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content,” (p. 42)

“Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purpose they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.” (p. 81)

“Whenever something good happens to me, I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly.” (p. 223)

“...I am a novelist, and I do try to take the novel seriously - partially because I’m conscious of the extraordinary privilege of being allowed to make a living from something as definitionally useless as art.” (p. 242)

“I mean that sympathetic engagement is a form of desire with an object but without a subject, a way of wanting without wanting, desiring for others not what I want for myself but the way I want for myself.” (p. 244)

“Because anytime I feel good for even five minutes something bad has to happen…Any time something really good happens, my life has to fall apart. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m the one doing it.” (p. 335)

“...from an aetiological standpoint, I feel like I’ve been locked in a smoke-filled room with thousands of people shouting at me incomprehensibly day and night for the last several years. And I don’t know when it will end, or how long it will take me to feel better afterwards, or if I ever will.” (p. 345)

“I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that - to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence and greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.” (p. 353)

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