Finished | Conversations with Friends, by Sally Rooney

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I finished reading Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends while I was at the lake house. I stayed up late into the night reading and reading until I finished it. The story was totally engaging and very relatable. The ending was marvelous.

I tend to highlight sentences that stand out to me when I read. Sometimes they stand out because they express an idea or an insight I want to remember. Other times I just like the way the sentence is put together.

Rather than expressing how wonderful I think this novel is, I'm just going to share some of the sentences I highlighted. If you're the sort of person who finds these sentences interesting you should read the book.

She got temporarily suspended once for writing ‘fuck the patriarchy’ on the wall beside a plaster cast of the crucifixion.

My father had ‘moods’. Sometimes during his moods my mother would take me to stay with her sister..

Not that God existed in any material way but as a shared cultural practice so widespread that it came to seem materially real, like language or gender.

The world was like a crumpled ball of newspaper to me, something to kick around.

By refusing to admit that I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head. If other people knew about it, the sickness would become real and I would have to spend my life being a sick person. This could only interfere with my other ambitions, such as achieving enlightenment and being a fun girl.

I closed my eyes. Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.

After I finished CwF, I started reading The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. It is also wonderful.