“Marianne replaces the yogurt pot in the freezer now and asks Joanna if she finds it strange, to be paid for her hours at work - to exchange, in other words, blocks of her extremely limited time on this earth for the human invention known as money.” PhilosophyWorkMoney Book:Normal People Source: Normal People
“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money.” CultureMoneyClassBooksMarketing Book:Normal People Source: Normal People
“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about. Even if the writer himself was a good person, and even if his book really was insightful, all books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything.” CultureLiteratureMoneyClassBooksMarketing Book:Normal People Source: Normal People
“What is he doing paying you in cash? she said. Is he like a drug dealer or something? Marianne said she thought he was some kind of property developer. Oh, said Joanna. Wow, that’s much worse.” MoneyHumourPropertyIronySarcasmDrugs Book:Normal People Source: Normal People
“It's like something he assumed was just a painted backdrop all his life has revealed itself to be real: foreign cities are real, and famous artworks, and underground railway systems, and remnants of the Berlin Wall. That's money, the substance that makes the world real. There's something so corrupt and sexy about it.” Money Book:Normal People Source: Normal People