Anna Burns

In this city, all these cities, we're all harmed; we are all victims. Can't we ever let it out that we're hurt, yet genuinely, on a fairly consistent basis, do some things we are happy about?

To avoid being a political figure in a book was impossible because not being a political figure was a political stance.

Every time I took a backward step, I ended up in a new, heightened, more sinister version of the previous problem.

That’s how love travels: evenly and non-discriminately through different lives. It’s true that many lives don’t want it, resigning themselves to getting by. But I’ve noticed it takes control autonomously, ringing out imprecise chimes deafening and insistent on unexpected nights.

He’d be doing this in order to bolster the spirit of a nation, he said, a nation crushed under the heel of British imperialism. I said but we’re trying to get Shit-Head off this street... he’s the only one in a position to do the copying!

But there was no convincing myself: I had lost the right to die not from suicide.

In Rome she’d acquired a pair of black sandals which somehow had made her feel dignified, so ever after she wandered bleak landscape swathed in drear, she couldn’t think of a single reason for re-starting or doing anything else, but at least she had dignity.

Seems as though he was a self-appointed guardian of standards - of what standards?

Love stories had basically been possible in the old days.

He had the most amazing dresses for them girls, would dress them all up the same at family gatherings... all these little-ever-fluttering-blurring dresses with satin bows on their pint-size waists, and all them together magically afloat and miraculously tiny.

This might not have been how it had begun, but it is what it had become - the fear of what would happen if I attempted simply to exist.

She craved the thought of a good choir practice: a simple little hope to get her through the discomfort and agitation of her life...