Цитаты из книги Waist Deep

Gender is not grammar but poetry.

Isn’t it lovely, that so much time can pass without seeing each other, and still it feels like they’ve never been apart? It’s a sign of true friendship, to be separated without it having any significance, that they can move along like parallel lines.

Can’t Charlie just pretend to like sophisticated things until she likes them, like other adults?

How is it even possible to be a woman without an inferiority complex, without imposter syndrome?

Each of them had been the brightest in their secondary-school class, and while they were relieved to have finally found a home, they also had to suffer the unforeseen humiliation of being average, mediocre, for the first time in their lives. They didn’t know who they were anymore. They were more themselves than ever. They were longing to be seen, but couldn’t bear to be known.

They were longing to be seen, but couldn’t bear to be known.

You have to savour the pockets you find, try to remember that this state will return, even if you forget the feeling of it: of purity, that liminal space between dreaming and waking, aware and alone, before the veil of the shared world is pulled aside, part of the world’s preparations; to be here, quiet as a mouse, like a spectator at a dress rehearsal.

We always have a deficit. The passive version of deficit is yearning. And the active version is conflict.

There is something almost provocative about their defencelessness, because it makes one imagine the attack.

There’s something inside you – her thoughts continue about her poppy-like children – that wants to be crushed, yes, that wants to be changed forever; you want to be tragic, you want to stop speaking, you want to be bereaved, and wouldn’t a small part of you also be relieved?

I have trouble with men who exist in the world like jellyfish in water. Like they’re made of the same stuff as society. They’re congruent. So, they can just blob around having a good old time without realising how easy things are for them.

He’s the kind of guy who would never see a therapist because he “thinks people talk too much about their feelings”, but if he did, it would be all: daddy, daddy, daddy.’