I recently finished reading Beautiful world where are you by Sally Rooney and I really enjoyed it. It’s different but good and I related to so many aspects of it. On today’s episode of Friday Quotes, I’ll be sharing quotes from this book.
Synopsis
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young-but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
Quotes from Beautiful world where are you
“It made me think about people who have done bad things. What they are supposed to do with themselves, and what we as a society are supposed to do with them. At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do?”
“I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy? Because I’m scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pity, or I don’t believe I deserve good things, or some other reason. Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.”
“And I do wonder why I’ve spent all this time feeling depressed about the end of something that wasn’t working anyway. I suppose on one level it’s just worse to get to the age of thirty without even one really happy relationship behind me. I think I would feel superficially sadder, but less fundamentally broken as a person, if I could just be sad about one break-up, rather than sad about my lifelong inability to sustain a meaningful relationship.”
“And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
“Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing.”
“I will probably continue to make poor life decisions and suffer recurrent depressive episodes”
“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing.”
I quite enjoyed the emails between Alice and Eileen. Female friendships, love, and relationships were also major themes in this book.
My rating
I’ve seen lots of mixed reviews of this. If you’ve read it, did you enjoy it?
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