Normal People Quotes
"Sometimes I feel like she does act kind of weird around me, but I wouldn’t say that to people or anything."
"Even in class I think she’s very flirtatious towards you."
"People are always going on at me that I fancy her or whatever, but I actually don’t, at all."
"You have nothing to worry about with your appearance."
"I wish you didn’t have to go, he says when she’s leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night."
"I don’t just like you for your brains, trust me."
"Well, you certainly don’t take after your mother, do you?"
"I think you’re a disgrace. I’m ashamed of you."
"That’s like something from nineteenth-century times, I’m actually laughing at that."
"It’s easy for them to have opinions, and to express them with confidence. They don’t worry about appearing ignorant or conceited."
"Literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’."
"People in Dublin often mention the west of Ireland in this strange tone of voice, as if it’s a foreign country."
"Sometimes on a night out, among a crowd of smiling women, his flatmate Niall will point out one person and say: I bet you think she’s attractive."
"At the same time, it forces him to acknowledge that his own clothes are cheap and unfashionable."
"His only shoes are an ancient pair of Adidas trainers, which he wears everywhere, even to the gym."
"He understands now that his classmates are not like him."
"They were coming into college every day to have heated debates about books they had not read."
"He’s amused at himself, getting wrapped up in the drama of novels like that."
"It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another."
"They just move through the world in a different way, and he’ll probably never really understand them."
"And he knows they will never understand him, or even try."
"You’re not really submitting to someone if you only submit to things you enjoy."
"I hope we can always take each other’s sides. It’s very comforting for me."
"Sometimes I think I deserve bad things because I’m a bad person."
"I don’t know if you realise that university is a very protective environment. It’s not like a workplace."
"In the end, we all occupy a world of our own, no one else’s."
"There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes."
"You need to get it straight in your mind what you think a good society would look like."
"I think there was something wrong with me when I was born."
"It's hard to dismiss something you've admittedly been hearing all your life."
"Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head."
"Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything."
"Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything."
"People are a lot more knowable than they think they are."
"It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, and then your whole life is different."
"No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt."
"How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary."
"You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget."
"She was in his power, he had chosen to redeem her, she was redeemed."
"I might as well be lying here, breathing the vile dust of the carpet into my lungs, gradually feeling my right arm go numb under the weight of my body, because it’s essentially the same as every other possible experience."