Sublime

realized that my mum and dad had met at university, had both obtained degrees, and yet my mum had not had a job since she married my dad.

She stood beside Nathan in the shadow of the open door; and it seemed to Thomas that he saw them as children and adults simultaneously, their bodies flickering between time past, and time to come. It suits me to think them children, he thought with pain, but they are not: here is a man with cigarettes in his pocket and God knows what else, here is

It was not the first time that motherhood provided the female version of civic virtue.

“But women all get that way after children come—too much mother, too little wife.”

In the arc of history, the freedom to explore the possibilities of our lives is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place.

far down the line. It hasn’t always been this way: in early-nineteenth-century Germany having a good friend was seen as more important than having a lover, and much closer to the roots of happiness.

There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time. Maybe that was why she had given up on so many things. Because she had it written in her DNA that she had to fail.