Best 16 quotes of Anna Burns on MyQuotes

also found the situation unworkable. Not just unworkable – ridiculous. Not just ridiculous – perturbing.

As we jumped the tiny hedge because we couldn't be bothered with the tiny gate to set off on our running, I inhaled the early evening light and realized this was softening, what others might term a little softening. Then, landing on the pavement in the direction of the parks & reservoirs, I exhaled this light and for a moment, just a moment, I almost nearly laughed.

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

Después del segundo rechazo, me reafirmé en mi decisión de no sentirme mal por él cuando me habló de "nuestra afinidad", fruto de "nuestra renegancia", mencionó nuestra relación sin que esta existiese, y entonces me di cuenta de que trataba mis desaires como si no lo fueran, como si de hecho contasen como primeras citas. En cuanto a sus modales de acosador y a lo seguro que estaba de nuestra relación y del futuro de nuestra unión, yo jamás habría imaginado que los perturbados, ilusos, obsesivos y amenazadores del mundo pudieran recuperarse al instante de ser perturbados, ilusos, obsesivos y amenazadores y dar marcha atrás como si se acabase el mundo hasta plantarse en la adulación y la oscuridad.

even though it was weird to talk on the telephone. Only eight times, seven, maybe six, ever had I done so.

how much I’d been thwarted into a carefully constructed nothingness by that man

I'd rather you came out with your filthy, unfitting language for the rest of your life than for you to turn out one of them cowardly people who can't speak their minds but won't hold their peace and instead mumble behind hands and get their fights out in sneakery and in whispers.

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.

Intense nosiness about everybody had always existed in the area. Gossip washed in, washed out, came, went, moved on to next target.

It broke the bounds of credibility, said the news, but lots of things in life break bounds of credibility. Breaking credibility, I was coming to understand, seemed to be what life was about.

It’s not about being happy,’ he said, which was, and still is, the saddest remark I’ve ever heard.

Of course there was the big one, the biggest reason for not marrying the right spouse. If you married that one, the one you loved and desired and who loved and desired you back, with the union providing true and good and replete with the most fulfilling happiness, well, what if this wonderful spouse didn't fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn't.

She had a glass of Bushmills in one hand and a glass of Bacardi in the other because she was still at that stage of working out what to have for her first drink.

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.

The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.

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