Quotes from Anna Burns

Okay,' I said. 'So if I were to stop walking-while-reading, and hands in pockets, and little night torches, and instead looked right and left and right again for dangerous, unscrupulous forces, does that mean I'll end up happy?' 'It's not about being happy,' he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I've ever heard.

You'd better be careful then,' said friend, which was what everybody said. People always said you'd better be careful. Though how, when things are out of your hands, when things were never really in your hands, when things are stacked against you, does a person – the little person down here on the earth – be that?

What if the next chapter was the same as this chapter, as had been the last chapter? What if all chapters stayed the same or even, as time went on, got worse?

Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, standoff or riots, I preferred to walk home, reading my latest book. This would be a 19th century book, because I did not like 20th century books, because I did not like the 20th century.

He was convinced, I could see, that this time 'round his words would produce quite the opposite effect on me, as in favorable, as in advantageous, especially as I'd had two brothers in the renouncers myself.

I suspected that if I kept up this curtailing, this cauterizing, all the distrust and systematic removal of myself from society, by age 20 it was more than likely I'd be at the stage of no longer opening my mouth to anyone, anywhere at all.

Unless you were dealing with the immensely stupid, which I wasn't, it was best to muss things up, to crease things, to leave tea stains, to place a small but partial muddy footprint, not exactly in the middle of the issue, but slightly to the side of, and hopefully suggestive of and incidental to the issue.

This was not the way of longest friend. Everything meant something to her. Everything was of use to her. Or to be made of use. To be stored away for utility at some future opportunistic date.

Still, I didn't like the implication that I had contracted an incurable beyond the pale.

or, at least, should have a rota

They were a double-page spread of a woman with long dark, unruly hair, wearing stockings, suspenders, something too, black and lacy. She was smiling out at me, leaning back and opening up for me, which was when I skidded and lost balance, catching full view of her monosyllable as I fell down on the path.

There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn't want to.

Bilmemkim McBilmemkim'in gö?süme silah dayay?p bana kedi dedi?i ve beni ölümle tehdit etti?i gün, sütçü'nün de öldü?ü gündü.

name, thereby

Then, landing on the pavement in the direction of the parks & reservoirs, I exhaled this light and for a moment, just a moment, I almost nearly laughed.

I didn't officially live with him and wasn't officially committed to him. If we were in a proper relationship and I did live with him and was officially committed to him, first thing I would have to do would be to leave.

He had never said her name. Indeed, he couldn't say it. Not because he'd forgotten it. Mot certainly he hadn't forgotten it. It was the dread of the capitulation of it, of the handing over of himself in it, of what it might take from him to pay her the compliment of letting her know he really knew her name.

It was the blue-hour, the era of endarkenment. In the air, however, was the delicious smell of life. Possibly real, possibly delusional, came the fragrance of newly cut grass, of freshly turned damp earth, of honeysuckle at the end of summertime - things that might make a person happy, especially unexpectedly happy, and which cost little, bar the willingness, and the gratefulness, to open up and breathe.