things i don't want to know, by deborah levy

(x)

"That spring when life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations."

"When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense."

"A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly." (x)

She writes of herself and the mothers she knew at the school gate as "shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn't really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about…" (x)