Everybody I love has to suffer. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t know how, I don’t know how to live.

complained to her about their own sorrows and received her sympathy in return, her family, her friends, who among them now would come to her defence? What loyalty had she purchased with her lifetime of good behaviour and self-sacrifice? None, nothing.

irruption

She wanted him, yes, with a terrible desire that threatened to destroy everything it touched. Their friendships, families, both their lives.

They have shown, they have demonstrated the possibility of these things, Ivan thinks, and therefore in a way proven to themselves and each other that their father is really gone, not only from the house, but from reality itself.

The most distressing thing about Bridget’s attitude to Margaret, and especially towards her marriage, is not the belief that Bridget is being cruel, so much as the suspicion, bred in the bone, a lifelong instinct, that after all she might be right.

to accept for the rest of his life the permanent encircling shadow of everything he has lost.

Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life

It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.