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Intermezzo

Book by Sally Rooney · 5 quotes · Life, Grief, Loss

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Intermezzo Quotes

“Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”

“To love, and for his love to be accepted, yes. It was in fact painful, the relief of all that compression suddenly, to say the words aloud, and hear her saying them, to be loved by her, it was so needed that it actually hurt. Not even a feeling of unmixed happiness, but of happiness that was strongly and confusingly mixed with many other feelings. Sadness, missing his father, and a kind of shame somehow because each passing day seemed to bring Ivan further away from him and the life they used to have together. A life that was receding increasingly into the past--into the realm of childhood and adolescence. The realization that his adulthood, into which he was entering now so definitively, and which would last all the rest of his life, would have to be lived without his father. That he was becoming a person his father would never know.”

“Only the loss remains which can never be recuperated. The event is over. The event has been overcome and yet the loss is only beginning. Every day it grows deeper. More and more is forgotten. Less and less is really known for certain. And nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the reassuringly concrete world of material fact. Tangible and specific fact. And how - how is it possible to accept this or even to understand what it means?”