The Rachel Incident Quotes

I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.

I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.

When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.

It was easy, now that I understood passion properly, to see why you would move heaven and earth to secure it.

It's not that we weren't capable of warmth as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged.

He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t.

The Bed Thing had happened two months ago. I'd wanted to move my bed, and decided to use magic to do it.Instead of scooting over a few feet, the bed had gone flying out the window, taking a big chunk of the wall with it. Mrs. Casnoff had not been amused. Especially since the Bed Thing had followed the Doritos Incident. Jenna had wanted chips; when I'd tried to make them appear, I'd flooded the hallway with Doritos. There were still traces of cheese dust in the floorboards. Before that, there was That Time With The Lotion (the less said about that, the better).

Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.

If I didn’t have carbs three times a day I couldn’t finish a sentence, and that was that.

Don’t you understand how condescending it is,” he said, “for someone you love not to tell you about the biggest thing happening in their life, because they don’t want to bother you? Because they think you can’t handle it?” “I just wanted to leave you out of it. Because I do love you. You know that. I’m always saying it.” “That’s not an act of love, Rache. It’s an act of…I don’t know, ambivalence. It’s an act of distance.

Perhaps it’s because so many people claim Irishness that we keep putting our private jokes on higher and higher shelves, so you have to ask a member of staff to get them down for you.

There was something ancient and Catholic in him, a pure defiant streak of old Rome that had been strong in his family and kept alive by living in the North. He wore a miraculous medal. He knew his saints.

I had always been brought up to think of plastic trees as tacky, that big dogs were better than small dogs, that potato waffles were common. So many of my beliefs about the world had been predicated on our once having had money.

I don’t know anyone who chases after stuff the way you do. I think you just want this big huge exceptional life, and you’re probably going to have a huge big exceptional love that goes with it.

The sex was unsatisfying but I couldn’t have been more obsessed with having it. I was always on top, moaning away like a stuck pig.

There’s something about sex with a long-term partner at the age of twenty that makes it the most depressing sex of your life.

I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.

Unable to believe how in a year where everything had changed, things had somehow managed to change again.

He talked about the book industry as if it were a dragon that was chained in the basement, and would tear us limb from limb at any moment.

I’m watching her knit,” he snapped. “I’m twenty-three years old in the greatest city on earth, and I’m watching this dumb bitch watch TV and knit.

Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in.

Some plans get made and they drop right into your hand like a warm egg. ... Others feel vague from conception, and carry on feeling vague no matter how many details you hammer onto them.

Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying raise a question that is not 9nly scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

I was a pretty cheerful person by nature. Emotionally dependable, like a good horse. Perhaps if I had been a more melancholy girl I would have been able to recognize that I was in the middle of a trauma, a word that still feels like it's for other people.

I think they felt guilty that they couldn’t help me in the way that I wanted to be helped. But we would get through it the way Irish people traditionally get through things. By getting shit-faced.

When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened. That was

I was angry at her for not recognising that I was no longer a simple intern, but I know that wasn’t everything. There was something spikier, crueller, underneath it. I was fond of Deenie Harrington, but in my head I had normalised that it was okay to do bad things to her. Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.

We ran into them at a Goldfrapp gig. They attended it the way I go to gigs with my own husband now—fun, dinner first, home by eleven, something to do. There’s only a short stretch in your life where you can attend gigs with spiritual commitment.

You could certainly say about half the cases of mass shootings are extreme incidents of domestic violence.” In other words, it’s not that domestic violence predicts mass shootings. It’s that mass shootings, more than half the time, are domestic violence.

commiserating over our hopeless men, “is that he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won’t commit to lunch plans.

We, in that way siblings do for outsiders, tried to make a travelling circus out of our childhood. Stories about old holiday rentals and falling out of trees.

She told me never to envy anyone from Oxbridge because all of them were either egotistical bullies or trembling and frightened of themselves.

The problem with genuine memories is that you know too much. It ruins everything.

I felt like an animal that had to take itself somewhere to die...You forget the pain of childbirth. But you forget other kinds of pain, too.

Sitting in his pokey little office, I thought what I always do when I’m in a small room with a man I’m not related to, which is: Are we gonna fuck?

The geyser was beautiful, and it splashed everyone, and the splash was so happily received that it felt like a version of Sea World for people who read The New York Times on their phone.

I groped at the air with my hands. “I’m just some dumpy chick who works in a bookshop, Carey, you could have rung and broke it off with me without it becoming the dance of the seven veils.

It’s tempting, when you’re talking about your sex life as a young woman, to slip into little melancholy asides about how you gazed heavy-lidded at the ceiling while a dull brute pummelled away at you. Sadly, I don’t think I can say any of that and get away with it. The sex was unsatisfying but I couldn’t have been more obsessed with having it.

So yeah, you were part of the job. Don't get me wrong, Mercer, I like you. You're smart, fluent in sarcasm, and, Bad Dog incident aside, pretty kick-ass at magic. And it's not like you're hard to look at." "Be still my beating heart." "But to answer your question, no part of the Archer Cross you knew at Hecate exists. That day in the cellar, I kissed you back because it was my job to stay close to you. If that's where you wanted to take things, then that's where I was going to go. I kissed you because I had to. Not exactly the hardest assignment I've ever had, but an assignment nonetheless." I stood there absorbing his words like blows, my heart aching. But it wasn't what he said that made me feel like I'd been punched in the chest. It's that I knew he was lying. That speech came out way too quickly and way too smooth, almost like he'd been practicing it in his head. The same way I'd been practing what I'd say to him if I ever saw him again. I couldn't even begin to handle that right now, so instead I just said, "Okay,then. Yay for honesty. Now that we're done with the confessional part of the evening, why don't you tell me why we're here." There was another pause, then he started walking again. I followed, leaves crunching under my feet. "Like I said, Hacte Hall has always made The Eye nervous." "Why? Are they allergic to plaid?" I thought he might laugh, but instead, he said, "Think about it,Mercer.One place where Prodigium round up their most powerful members? Don't tell me that's not suspicious." That had never occurred to me. I'd always just thought of all us at Hecate as giant screwups, but in a way, Archer was right. We'd all been sentenced to Hex Hall because of spells that were powerful and dangerous. I thought of Cal saying I created "too big." Wasn't that what just about everyone at Hecate had done? Still, the idea that the place I'd called home for nearly a year was actually some evil farm for powerful Prodigium was unsettling to say the least.

He put his hands on my hips. He was shy, all of a sudden. There was a second of feeling like two teenagers who had been set up by their friends at the school disco. We exchanged a well, look at us! expression, and he tilted his head, very slightly, to kiss me. And the kiss was like—what was it like? It was like finding your favourite pair of boots under the bed. It was like finding them on the last day of your lease, the boxes already in the van, having assumed that they must have been left at an ex-lover’s house, or simply vanished by your own carelessness. Oh, these. Oh. Oh. I love these. When I finally stopped kissing him, I put my arms around his waist, and laid my head on his shoulder. My nose dug deep to find the old smell, my hands on the rough denim of his jacket. I had missed him so much, and I hadn’t even known it. “Carey,” I said. “Carey, Carey, Carey.” “Darling,” he replied. “I think you’re a bit old to call me by my last name.” And so now, everyone I love is called James.

picked up that rage, and held on to it; I needed to remind myself why I hated Carey, because watching him lock up the bread shop was far too entrancing. The smell of pastry, the chocolate melting on my tongue, the bitter black coffee. I needed to remind myself of my anger, so I didn’t inadvertently mix up good snacks with a good man.

There was no way of telling the story without paraphrasing it as a Maeve Binchy novel.

He is often one of five writers behind a funny woman’s big film, and has so many Instagram followers that he sometimes does adverts for PrEP.

By the sixteenth Cecilia, James and I had given birth to our relationship, and it wandered around the house like a sticky curious foal.

forty euro is wasteful, especially as it can only be used once. That small dogs fare better in small houses. That potato waffles

On top of the recession, there was also a lot of anxiety around the Kindle and what it would do to bookshops.

Every time I move house, I dedicate another day to sitting on the floor, reading all the voices James tried on before he found his own.

room. Life felt very full, and very funny. There was a whole life of first times to have, first times I hadn’t even considered yet!

felt like a child whose imaginary friend was starting to bite people. The game had already gone too far.

I liked dead women talking glibly about society. I liked long paragraphs about rationing and sexual awakenings in France.

bleak news breaks in the Health Service Journal that Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow has been forced to declare a critical incident after running out of ICU beds.

I think, quite a lot actually, about whether Shay is anything like the baby I would have had back in 2010, if either my brain or my body had been up to the task of keeping it.

You were sixteen when Chernobyl went up, Ollie.” Sangster recalled the incident. “Yes, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it, just as the other disasters I saw. I see the incidents just hours before they occur and are helpless to prevent it, as the details are usually too vague. No, Rachel, at least consoling the living does not warrant a spell in a straitjacket.

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

Big, strange Dr. Byrne, lover of French wine and fancy little cakes. The Portuguese tarts he brought us, still warm from the English Market. That deep yellow taste, the freckles of blackened sugar on the top.

Courtship, to me, was about text messages. It was about sending someone a good-morning and a good-night message. It was ending every text with an x, or three x's, or a long line of them when you were really pleased. It was about withholding x's when you were moody, and then they would notice, and ask you what was wrong. These were the rules of love I had learned from my all-girls school, and it confused me when someone didn't play.

Jesus,” Carey said, and I was relieved. He looked haunted. He was older than me, and obviously more experienced, but it hadn’t been an ordinary thing for him either. “Jesus. Fucking hell, Rachel. What was all that about?

We walked that way together, and despite my longing to crack open James and live in him, it seemed like there was no time for me to ask questions. James didn’t really want to ask questions either. He wanted to make assumptions.

picked up the thread, and blathered something from Yeats, butchering a quote I had read on JSTOR about when a country creates a genius, the country is always mad at the genius for not reflecting the right idea of the country itself.

It was the most beautiful house I’d ever been in. At that age, you’ve only ever been in family homes or student houses. The home of two artsy professionals in their thirties is a magnificent thing to behold, more enchanting than an old Russian palace

all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people.

I have read a lot of books about the lasting trauma of young women and their dastardly corrupt English professors and what happens when they fuck you. I have read nothing whatsoever on the trauma of when your English professor decides not to fuck you.

Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying raise a question that is not only scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized

As he was putting his books in his locker one day, a white male student pointed at Izaiah’s brand-new Air Jordans and said, “Those are some real nigger shoes.” What was most disturbing about this incident was that it wasn’t an aberration but a regular occurrence.

This is what it’s like to love an unreliable man, or to have an untenable job, or an unsteady parent, or an ill child. It is the outfit you constantly dress up and down, accessorising it according to what insecurities hang well, what caveats are the most slimming.

After I moved to London, I found that my accent, my good manners and my vague ability to reference Trollope helped build a picture for my English peers that became more than the sum of its parts. “You have one of those nice Irish voices,” someone once said to me. “Soft.

If we weren’t eating chocolate mousse from a vat intended for catering, we were having loud, odd sex. I should have been more embarrassed. There were previous iterations of my personality that would have been. But with Carey I discovered new depths of shamelessness, and I liked

Rachel, You have been poisoned with a potentially lethal dose of Tarquinomid. Your doctors will be able to reverse the side effects once they know this. If you value your life, you will not mention this incident to anyone. Never set foot in China again. This is your last warning.

It feels strange now, setting that first conversation down like this, because it does nothing to communicate how James was. How utterly charming this opener was to me. “Someone here has scabies.” He said it like he was Poirot investigating a country house blighted by murder. Like someone who saw the inherent prejudices of our polite society and was prepared to unveil it.

The year in Shandon Street did a lot for me, but it did this most of all. It detached me from any kind of inherited moral system. I stopped sizing others up in accordance with the values I had been taught: who was a loser, who was closeted, who was cheating on their wife. I learned the value of context, and of people. It came in handy later on, when I became a journalist.

When I first met you,” she said, “with that stupid carry-on about how the shop wanted to put on the launch for his awful book. I knew something was off. It didn’t make any sense. And then when I actually saw you…” She allowed herself a dry cackle. “I thought, Oh God, how silly, she’s just a chubby student with a crush.” Of all the things Deenie Harrington said that night, this is the line that I have come back to the most. On my worst days, on my bad dates, on the job interviews that didn’t quite work out the way they should. Just a chubby student with a crush. Big blotches broke out on Deenie’s neck

didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane. It was how my mother fought with me, how I fought with my younger brothers, and how they fought with their friends. It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us. That the most recent economic crisis had devastated my parents’ business and depleted their investments was yet more proof that the world was out to get the Murrays. We were responding, at that time, by giving the world the cold shoulder.

It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.

Since Jonathan, I had not slept with anyone. I know. Aren’t you disappointed? There was kissing; there were bodies pressed up against the various walls of Cork city night clubs; there were hands in my knickers. There were boys—cute ones, nice ones—who had walked me home after the club kicked out, their jackets draped around my shoulders, their hands laced through mine. But whenever they would imply that they had walked me home for sex, had understood that I wanted to have sex also, I acted all disgraced. “You think I’m that easy, huh?” I said to them, feigning shock that a twenty-one-year-old boy standing without a jacket in February at two in the morning might have an ulterior motive. I would send them packing, triumphant, then I would go inside and feel depressed, stupid and horny. I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.

There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman’s life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work.

I wanted to be caught in a beam of sunlight looking elegant and melancholy, possibly writing a poem at the same time

Tammy's nails tapped as she typed, and then she licked the tip of a ballpoint pen and shuffled a stack of papers. "Nothing on file. Would you like to make a formal incident report?" Este slumped lower, dropping her chin in her hands. Everything Mateo had told her had been a lie, even his name. She shouldn't have been surprised, but maybe she'd wanted to believe him. "If I do, will you hang up Most Wanted signs around campus?" Tammy blinked, unenthused.

I'm your best friend," he snapped once, when he saw me circling and underlining a manuscript, the way Deenie had taught me to. I had graduated from her slush pile and was now doing some light editing. "You're supposed to love me the most." The baldness of this. It was something neither of us would say to a boyfriend, terrified as we were of admitting raw and open need. But we could say it to each other.

I didn’t know how to be mad at people yet, so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane.

Ursprungligen valde jag litteraturvetenskap för att jag tyckte om att läsa, men jag tyckte framför allt om läsning för att jag var bra på det. Jag hade lärt mig att läsa ganska snabbt som barn och eftersom jag saknade andra uppenbara talanger verkade det vara en värdig sak att ägna mig åt om så bara för att få mer beröm.

I’ve had this idea in my head since I was young that a person’s body is a factory, a big Edwardian job, and that you need every worker comfortably sitting at their station before the day’s work can begin. The bigger the person, the further the workers have to travel: trudging up stairs, turning down corridors.

It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged.

My aversion to crafting goes way back to an incident in kindergarten during which, upon gluing something like the fortieth Cheerio to the inside of a giant O-shaped construction paper cutout, I was suddenly struck by the futility of human existence.

submit this statement, acknowledging my role in this tragedy. Any resulting consequence from this incident rests squarely on me.

I was paranoid the way only people of my generation are paranoid, that I was about to be publicly derided by an unseen, online mass for ideological crimes committed as a teenager.

I still thought I was the centre of this story, the main character, just because it had started that way.

The thing about Carey," James said once, when we were up late and commiserating over our hopeless men, "is that he would walk over hot coals for you, but he won't commit to lunch plans.

When something good happens to you at that age, you can't settle with the notion that it's a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That's how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.

And the kiss was like—what was it like? It was like finding your favourite pair of boots under the bed. It was like finding them on the last day of your lease, the boxes already in the van, having assumed that they must have been left at an ex-lover’s house, or simply vanished by your own carelessness. Oh, these. Oh. Oh. I love these.

I chose English, originally, because I liked to read. But even then what I liked most about reading was that I was good at it. I had taken to it quite quickly as a child. In the absence of any other discernible gift, it seemed like a fine thing to pursue, if only to receive more praise.

Every so often a feminist argument makes it into the public consciousness that even the most self-hating of young women will adopt. There was a lot of chat around then about slut-shaming, around men policing how women dressed, around what the term 'asking for it' actually meant. We had identified Fred Byrne's slut-shaming tendencies not two weeks prior. The idea was in my mind, and so I seized on this fragment of what Carey was saying -- dressed like this -- and ignored the context of what he was actually talking about. What he was talking about was secrecy, and the possibility that I was cheating on him. What I heard was a critique of my outfit. 'Fuck you, Carey?' I said, my voice low and serious. 'I can dress how I want.

when a country creates a genius, the country is always mad at the genius for not reflecting the right idea of the country itself.

while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

Quite the largest percentage,” Rachel said, “of child molestations are committed by heterosexual men. As I pointed out in my book, the incidence of child molestation by lesbians is so small as to be statistically meaningless.

Of course. The first thing to happen after a major incident was that everybody in the vicinity hammered their phones.

It’s an option, yes,” said Silton. “But in every incident involving one of those groups, there’s been a declaration by the perpetrator. They like to shout out their beliefs for everyone to hear. All this woman said was run.

There is a certain personality type that is addicted to the concept of its own intellect.

It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged. People were always wronging us.

I didn’t know how to be mad at people yet so I just aped the behaviour I had seen at home: speaking to someone in tight, terse little sentences until they went insane.

I nodded. It made sense. If you walked around with Cher on your iPod then you had probably thought more seriously about whether you were attracted to men than the average rugby-playing alpha male. I saw James as extremely advanced, a person who had interrogated all sides of his soul. He was too emotionally intelligent to get stuck in the doldrums of what music or behaviour seemed gay or straight.