42 Quotes by Anna Burns

As for the environment, that too, would object, backing up the pessimism of its people, which was what happened where I lived where the whole place always seemed to be in the dark. It was as if the electric lights were turned off, always turned off, even though dusk was over so they should have been turned on yet nobody was turning them on and nobody noticed either, they weren’t on.

Lots of people haven’t done anything,′ said longest friend. ‘And still they’re not doing it, will always be not doing it, in their private coffins down at the usual place.

To shoot up a district of women, children, prams and goldfish otherwise, to run them through with swords much as one might like to, would not look good, would look grave, sexist, unbalanced, not only in the glare of the critical side of the home media, but also in the eyes of the international media.

Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn’t cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it.

At eighteen I had no proper understanding of the ways that constituted encroachment.

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.

That relative, that temporal plane – where sensitivities vary, where no one has the same personal history even if they have the same communal history, where something which is a trigger for one person passes off unnoticed by another person – definitely was the place where the raw living of life and the imperfect mental response to that raw living took place.

Cats are not adoring like dogs. They don’t care. They can never be relied upon to shore up a human ego. They go their way, do their thing, are not subservient and will never apologise. No one has ever come across a cat apologising and if a cat did, it would patently be obvious it was not being sincere.

If only I’d done such and such instead of such and such, gone there instead of there, said that and not that, or looked different, or hadn’t gone out that day with Ivanhoe or that night or that week or anytime during the last two months.