Sally Rooney Intermezzo Quotes

Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.

what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.

It doesn't always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.

Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.

Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.

And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good

I just want to say, I’m on your side. I know I’ve never done anything to help you, Ivan, but in principle, in spirit. I’ve been on your side all along.

We’re being hard on ourselves in a way, he remarks, because both our lives involve some voluntary exposure to what other people might call defeat. Which I think requires a certain degree of courage.

But it is a pleasure, isn't it, on a crisp September night in Dublin to walk with long free strides along a quiet street. In the prime of his life. Incumbent on him now to enjoy such fleeting pleasures. Next minute might die. Happens every day to someone.

Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.

She lets out a trembling kind of laugh. Well, if there is a God, she says, I'm sure he loves you very much. He lowers his eyes. Yeah, I can feel that sometimes, he says. Like when I'm with you, I can. If you don't mind me saying that.

Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?

But I’m very happy that I met you. And even knowing that you’re alive, I feel like my life will be a lot better. Just being able to remember – being with you, and having such a nice experience together.

How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind.

Once you meet your soulmate, there’s no point pretending, is there? Feeling of solace you get when she’s near you. To live the right life.

He doesn’t want after all for others to be poor, doesn’t even want to be rich. No. He only wants what he has always wanted: to be right, to be once and for all proven right.

From that so firmly suppressed feeling, present all along, that when he looks at her, when he speaks to her, he is addressing not only the superficial but also the deep concealed parts of her personality – without meaning to, without knowing how not to.

Ivan, since unlike his brother he doesn’t assign an idiotically high, practically moral degree of value to the concept of normality, which phrased in another way means conformity with the dominant culture.

She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn't true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.

Nobody when they're rejected believes it's really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction — which even makes sense from an evolutionary perspective — is simply the strangest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.

But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.

To do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God’s humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself? And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.

Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who's gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they're gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don't think about him, literally, I'm ending his existence.

Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word. In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige.

In nature, he thinks, there is no such thing as ugliness. It's like he tried to tell Margaret in the car, beauty belongs to god, and ugliness to human beings.

The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.

The inexchangeable pleasure of her conversation. Just to walk the streets saying things, anything, just the act itself, walking together at the same speed, and talking, purely to amuse and please one another, to make each other stupidly laugh, for no further accomplishment, no higher purpose, to let their words rise and disperse forever in the damp brackish air.

There is more to life than great chess. Okay, great chess is still a part of life, and it can be a very big part, very intense, satisfying, and pleasant to dwell on in the mind's eye: but nonetheless, life contains many things. Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.

Peter naturally unable to be thirsty on main, he has a career to think about.

The miracle of existing completely together in this way for even one moment on God’s earth, she thinks. If never again in her life another, only to be here now, with him.

And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

Lightly she has to hold the world. Lovingly, but lightly.

Walking into the peaceful quiet of her presence he feels himself at rest.

After weeks of sleeplessness he wakes now only to hear her turning on the coffee machine in the morning, low pummeling sound through the wall. Peace so intense he could weep. Just to inhabit lightly the space that is cleared for him by her tactful silence.

When he saw her waiting for him at the gate: to encounter not only her, the beauty of her nearness renewed, but also himself, the self that is loved by her, and therefore worthy of his own respect.

Doesn’t the feeling between people have a truth of its own? Not in the sense of formal propositional truth-value, no. But then why does that word, ‘truth,’ have a certain sensation to it, which is not exhausted by the formal definition?

Under what conditions is life endurable? She ought to know. Ask her. Don't.

Quietly they look at one another. Love at times indistinguishable from hatred.

The suddenness and finality of November evenings.

No one is perfect. Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you. And then in other people’s lives you do the same thing, you’re the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead.

the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.

To hear his name in her voice, he closes his eyes. The name has become so precious to him, his own name, from the way it sounds in her mouth.

It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.

To remember that God is not the nice man Jesus, who liked everybody and went around healing the sick; that God is, on the contrary, the one who makes people sick, who condemns people to death, for incomprehensible reasons. Jesus the healer, the listener, teacher, friend of sinners, seems in Margaret’s mind to be practically on the brink of murmuring: Sorry about my dad… Jesus is easy to love and God much harder.

Sense of all the windows and doors of her life flung open. Everything exposed to the light and air. Nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore. A wild woman, her mother called her. A shocking piece of work. And so she is. Lord have mercy.

Nothing he has done or felt in this regard before has prepared him remotely for this new experience, with Margaret: the experience of mutual desire. To feel an interpenetration of thought between the two of them, understanding her, looking at her and knowing, yes, even without speaking, what she feels and wants, and knowing that she understands him also, completely.

If being around his brother makes him feel bad, why should he have to do it? On the other hand it strikes her as some kind of imperative, perhaps even a law of nature, that people should do their best for one another in times of grief. Ivan and his brother have both lost the same father: surely the loss is something that should be shared, expressed, consoled, not kept separate and silent. But

It is wrong to be vain: obscurely, warming her hands over the air vent, Margaret knows and admits to herself that it is wrong. But wrong in what way? Who is the victim of the wrongness: just herself? Or, somehow, other people?

I don't know why. It makes me depressed when I think about it. You have all these dreams that you're going to keep getting better and better. And then in reality you just start getting worse, and you don't even understand why.

Inevitability of death. Meaningless existence, false scaffold of morality assembled around nothing. The final permanent nothing that is the only truth.

Even if it’s rare, to have a few times in life and no more, still worth living for, he thinks. To have met her like this: beautiful, perfect. A life worth living, yes.

I forgive you, of course. Everything. I love you very much, and I forgive you, completely.

This way accepting consolation he must accept also that he needs it.

You know, everyone in their twenties has these problems you’re talking about – feeling left out, and thinking people don’t like you. Those aren’t serious problems at your age, even if they feel that way.

Yes, I was looking for you, but I only wanted to see and be near you, and actually it wasn’t going to matter what either of us said as long as we could be in physical proximity to one another, making eye contact, breathing each other’s breath for a while, how does that sound.

For Peter, social systems are never confusing, always transparent, and usually manipulable to his own ends. He is someone who not only knows a vast number of people, but through knowing them can somehow make them do things he wants them to do.

What does it mean to love someone, then? I'm curious. If you don't care about the person's feelings, and you're not nice to them, and you don't really want them to be happy, how is that love, in your opinion? Maybe we have different definitions.

The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love. Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted.

The most distressing thing about Bridget’s attitude to Margaret, and especially towards her marriage, is not the belief the Bridget is being cruel, so much as the suspicion, bred in the bone, a lifelong instinct, but after all she might be right. Can the deep childhood impulse to trust one’s mother, to agree with her against oneself, ever be wrestled down by the comparatively thin force of reasoned argument? Are there even reasoned arguments to be made in matters of love, marriage, intimate life?

A very strong feeling comes over him then: something inside himself warm and spreading, like dying or being born. He has no idea what the feeling is, whether it’s good or dangerous. It’s related to her, the words she’s saying, his feeling about her words.

Like he just sort of exited from time, and we all have to keep going, within time. Do you know what I mean?

Well yeah, we’re blood-related. He’s my brother. That doesn’t mean we have to like each other.

You hate men more than I do, says Naomi. Obviously true, since she goes to bed with them of her own free will.

Oh, you take conversation too seriously, she says. Life isn’t just talking, you know.

But it is a pleasure, isn’t it, on a crisp September night in Dublin to walk with long free strides along a quiet street.

I feel like if I created a new human being out of nothing, I would be very happy with them. Just that they were alive, even.

It’s like you said, you can drive yourself crazy thinking about these things. The other lives you could have had.

You drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past. But sometimes I think, actually, I didn't have that much power over my life anyway. I mean, I couldn't give myself a new personality out of nothing. And things just kind of happened to me.

But a person’s outward appearance does not define the boundaries of their internal feelings, Ivan knows. Plain, unappealing people are by no means exempt from the experience of strong passions.

Sometimes wonders how much of his capacity for pleasure is just vanity. Please, I need it. Oh God, it feels so good. He loves that. Happy woman. Compliment deeper and more intense, to make her.

nature, he thinks, there is no such thing as ugliness. It’s like he tried to tell Margaret in the car, beauty belongs to God, and ugliness to human beings, although he couldn’t explain himself very well.

She feels for him, surrounded by these blustering middle-aged people, men who admire him and at the same time fear and perhaps resent him, men who want to impress him but also to intimidate or slight him.

and when he looked at her, she seemed to feel herself understood completely, as if everything that had ever happened to her, everything that she had ever done, was accepted quietly into his understanding.

The image of that life: how beautiful, to believe it could after all be possible. For so long it has hurt too much even to think. And now everything hurts so much all the time that to think makes no difference, to think even lends a kind of sweetness to the terrible pain. The life they could have had together,

Jesus is easy to love and God much harder. Jesus also has his own reality, his place in history, whereas God is like a dim point of light in a dark room, visible only as long as you don’t try to look directly.

For you I would do the same: and isn't that the basic problem, that he would do the same, wants to, amd Chris in heaven, actually does. When civilisation is fundamentaly premised on the exclusivitity of such willingness.

A Ivan le late el pulso tan acelerado y tan fuerte en los oídos, que se pregunta por un segundo si se oirá al otro lado de la línea, si es médicamente posible eso, oír el latido del corazón de una persona en una llamada de teléfono: seguramente no.

I was there, I served my hours, punched my time card, don't forget. I did everything that could be done. Don't blame me. I was there. While his father sat timidly beside him, embarrassed probably by his peremptory manner. Afraid of alienating the doctors. Why even think about that now. The suffering of another person. Which he failed to stop. False show of competence only disguising the act of his uselessness, his failure to do anything, to make anything better, to make any difference at all.

Next minute might die. Happens every day to someone. And the man was no age, as everyone kept saying, sixty-five, that was all. Peter halfway there himself now, thirty-two and six months. Already middle-aged by that calculation. Frightening how quickly it all falls away.

Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically.

Sevgiyle nefreti ayırt etmek bazen olanaksız.

fear judgement was not the same thing as believing that the judgement was valid.

Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live. Hard cold wind blowing in from the sea, blowing his coat back, raising white hackles on the river. Nothing is fixed. She, the other. Ivan, the girlfriend. Christine, their father, from beyond the grave. It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.

You think you can vanish into thin air and it won't affect me? Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved. Aloud he says: Whatever, I don't know.

No one is perfect. Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can't be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn't their fault and it's not yours either. You just needed something they didn't have in them to give you. And then in other people's lives you do the same thing, you're the person who lets everyone down, who fails to make anything better, and you hate yourself so much you wish you were dead.

For example, I do a little bit of data analysis, like I was saying. For tech companies mostly. They’ll give me a lot of data – say user experience data, like how long users spend on each section of a website – and I’ll spend a few hours making graphs and whatnot. Say it takes me – I don’t know, four hours to make these graphs, and I’ll pretend it took me ten hours, to get extra money. He glances over at her again, and adds: You might think that’s immoral, I don’t know. But anyway, never mind that for a second. The four hours that I actually spend making the graphs, and the ten hours that I get paid for: what is that? Like, any of that: what is it? At least when I worked as a delivery driver, I knew what I was doing. Someone wanted a Big Mac, and I brought it to them, and the amount I got paid was like, what it was worth to that person not to have to collect their own burger. The amount they will pay, not to leave the house, is the amount I will accept, yes to leave the house. Minus whatever the app is taking. If you get me. I get you. You’re making perfect sense. Oh good, he says. Because in the data analysis example, my question is, what is the money that’s being paid to me? It’s the money that the company will pay, to have their own information explained back to them in a graph. And how much money should that be? Clearly no one knows, because at the end I’ll make up a number of hours and they’ll just pay me for that number. I guess the graph is supposed to make the company more profitable, in theory, but no one knows by how much, it’s all made up.

Ivan explained that it was an established problem in formal logic. You have to think of it as a conditional, he said. Saying ‘all my hats are green’, it’s like saying ‘for all hats, if they are mine, then they are green’. And if there aren’t any hats that satisfy the condition of being mine, it can’t be a lie to describe them as green. You can say anything about the hats and it would be true, because they don’t exist. That’s called vacuous truth.

Who was looking out for me, Ivan? When I was the one who needed help, where were the two of you? No, you didn’t want to talk, you didn’t want to know. Neither of you. And why, because it made you feel awkward, you didn’t know what to say. You want to know why I treat you like a child? Because you are a fucking child. When things get difficult, you’re gone. You’re out of the room. And that’s alright, I don’t expect anything else. Maybe with Dad I did, but I learned my lesson. He didn’t want me to be his son, he wanted me to be his protector. And yours. So that’s what I was. All my life, I was looking out for the both of you. And neither of you ever even had the decency to say thanks.

Nuala, on the other hand, exerts influence over her husband and children primarily through a tendency to become irrationally anxious and ‘upset’. Much of the family life has therefore always been arranged around their collective efforts to prevent Nuala from becoming ‘upset’, which involves concealing from her, by almost any means necessary, the existence of any problems or potential conflicts within the family circle. Nuala lives, to some degree, in a fictitious world acted out for her by a special dramatic troupe consisting of her own children and husband, a world in which none of her loved ones have ever been unhappy, sick, depressed, disappointed, hurt, anxious or frightened. But this, in Anna’s view, has also had the perverse effect of making Nuala feel as if her own anxieties are in fact the only anxieties that anyone on earth has ever experienced, and that her suffering is something she alone, the only unhappy person in a world of thriving and self-confident individuals, can understand.

How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it's practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it's due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind. He has his good qualities, kind of, but none of them have much to do with living in the world that he actually lives in, the only world that can be said in a fairly real way to exist.

Shaking his head he seems to hear himself saying aloud: I feel like maybe I still don’t accept it. The idea that my dad is gone. I don’t really get how it could be the case, if you see what I mean. I think I do, she says. Like he just sort of exited from time, and we all have to keep going, within time. Do you know what I mean? Quietly she says: In a way. He wipes at his nose, his eyes, and tries to swallow. I just feel like there were certain things left unfinished, he says. You know, that we didn’t talk about, or that I didn’t understand.

Hiç kimse dış kaynaklı nedenlerle reddedildiğine inanmaz. Üstelik hemen hiçbir zaman dışsal nedenlerle ilgisi yoktur çünkü ortak çekim -ki evrimsel açıdan da böylesi mantıklı- bir şeyi yapmanın en önemli sebebidir, aksi yöndeki tüm ilkeleri hükümsüz kılarak hiçliğe dönüştürür.

This is what you get. To work in a nice place with a few interesting people, to have friends with whom to discuss life and ideas. To attend the theatre, to hear live music, to arrange the use of the studio room on Monday nights for the local philosophy reading group. Oh, Kierkegaard, that'll be interesting. To exercise once again, for a little time, who knows how long, the power to charm and fascinate, to be the object of an intense and searching desire. And to feel inside herself the reciprocating force of desire, this is what she gets, a life of her own.

Does it make sense to think this way, in terms of moving forces? Like the feeling Ivan had for his father has nowhere to go anymore, like it's lodged inside him, unexpressed. In the weeks since his father died Ivan has not heard these words from anyone, l love you, or said them to anyone either. Does this explain his intense longing to hear and say them again, to relieve the pressure of this confined force inside his body? Even to think of Margaret with love gives a little relief, to allow the feeling of love into his thoughts, like a flower opening outwards inside his mind.

A lot of negative feelings could follow on from that: sadness, low self-esteem, anger at yourself and the other person, despair. People probably have lost their minds over less, and gone actually crazy from the misery. And yet, at the same time, it seems incredibly possible now, tantalisingly possible, that he might once again hear her voice murmuring his name in a low pleasurable satisfied tone while he makes love to her. And for this, he thinks, whatever: despair, heartbreak, even losing his mind and going insane later on, anything. Literally, anything, any price. Yeah, he says. I think it’s a good idea. I do.

Nobody when they’re rejected believes it’s really for extraneous reasons. And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.

He’s still looking at her even now. Why did she say the word ‘passionate’ to him when they were talking? And why did he repeat it so many times, three or even four times? Is the word ‘passionate’, or is it not, basically an obscene item of vocabulary? No, it isn’t. But is it like a small bandage placed over an item of vocabulary that is in fact obscene? Maybe, yes. A word with blood running through it, a red word.

She touches his arm now and he feels himself almost angrily seizing at her, desperate, forceful, and in a thin fluttering voice she’s saying: Peter, I’m sorry. I know I haven’t helped you, I’ve made everything worse. I didn’t know what I was doing. Frightened she sounds: and he also is frightened. Clutching at her, her living body, he presses his face blindly into her hair. She has been cold, cruel, vain, yes, he thinks, she, Sylvia, she has lied to him, tried to manipulate him, she has made everything worse. And he too has been dishonest, cowardly, pretending to believe her lies, and his own. She has hated him all along for leaving her, he knows that, and he has hated her for telling him to go. I forgive you, he says. Do you forgive me? Hears the trembling little smile in her voice, answering: I forgive you, of course. Everything. I love you very much, and I forgive you, completely.