## Metadata - Author: [[Michael Marshall Smith]] - Full Title: Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence - Category: #books ## Highlights - Hannah wanted to take the words back, but couldn’t – not without having somewhere else to put them. The words were real things, and their story was real, and she realized that she’d needed to say them to someone. She wasn’t sure if it should have been her mom, or dad, or even Granddad, for not being able to promise her everything would be OK. But somebody needed to hear, to hear right now and to understand, that everything was not OK. There was only one word for that. Hannah had never hated anyone or anything before in her life, but right now the word was there in the centre of her head. She couldn’t see past it. ([Location 843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=843)) - at a crack in the earth in the back of beyond. ([Location 1631](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=1631)) - Hannah didn’t know that humankind has a deep-set belief in the idea that we create and maintain reality through ritual, that repeated actions are what keep the spheres in alignment. She also didn’t know that it doesn’t work, and that there are far older, more complex, and much darker designs in motion, ones that override ours as effortlessly as a crack of thunder blotting out birdsong. ([Location 2010](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2010)) - Who comes and talks to you, in the long watches of the night? Whose voice do you hear as you lie brittle-eyed, oppressed by sheets and twisting in your skin? You assume it must be your own, because the voice knows so much about you – but this voice never soothes or celebrates. It needles and stirs. It speaks to you through twitches in your soul and a tightening in the guts, and it tells you that things are not OK, and it may be too late to fix them, or yourself. You have to listen, though. It will be this voice that finally finds the words to get you to talk to the doctor about that lump, or call your father, or give up drinking. It may be this voice that levers up the endless coats of paint with which you have coated yourself, and reveals something rotting inside; or else convinces you that the interior is clean and true after all, and it is the work of others that has made you feel otherwise. ([Location 2249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2249)) - Something to be said for a marriage, even one where the communication machine has stopped working, is the shorthand of friendship and shared years. If she’d got up one morning and told Steve she had to go somewhere, urgently, he would have said fine, asked what time she’d be back and if she could pick up some avocados. He would have trusted that she had a reason and that it would be good enough. Trust like this has to be earned. It can be lost, of course. ([Location 2263](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2263)) - A spell in Airportland, following its rituals and signs. Standing in line. Submitting to people in garish uniforms. The same questions as always, the same answers, and then a thin piece of cardboard that tells you where to go and when. Magazines and bottled water to take on board. A glazed wander around the kind of stores they have in airports, buying nothing. She didn’t need any more expensive scarves. Strangers milling to and fro like clouds. What seem like hours of dead time, and then a hurried hike down a mile of affectless corridor and you’re ready to go stand in another line, between people who are either making a big deal of how they do this every day, or otherwise are silent, and quite scared. The plane. Dry air. A cursory nod at whomever you’ve been put next to, a sparkleless smile, wordless ways of saying I mean you no ill will but let’s keep our elbows under control – plus if you’re wondering if I want to talk (or listen), the answer is a big fat ‘no’. Watch the video that pretends that, should this thing drop out of the sky, the big issue is whether you bring your handbag. Take off. Have a drink. Sink into the iPad, cut with sessions on the laptop. Get ahead of next week’s work, always. Eat. Restroom. Laptop. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. ([Location 2271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2271)) - I hate you. Parents hear those words more often than anyone, and always from those they love the most. Families are the crucibles that temper the toughest of love’s swords. It gets intense in there sometimes. You know you’re going to get slapped with those words sooner or later, when the little person in your charge glares hot-eyed up at you and flexes their soul. You’ll joke about it with your partner before it happens, how someday this bundle of dependency will carve off sufficient autonomy to stab you with the cutting words. You figure it’ll be in their teens, but in fact it starts a lot earlier. Kids are leaving you from the day they’re born. They have their pens in their hands and start making marks on their own sheets of paper, their first words and sentences, their personal Chapter One. It’s shocking to have those words hurled at you, but you come to take them for the spasm of frustration or low blood sugar they usually are. ([Location 2297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2297)) - The Devil knew things. It was what he did: the Knowing of Things. That plus all the evil, of course. The Devil played the endless ebb and wash of evil like a man standing in the ocean, sculpting the currents around him like a conductor. One movement of his hands was enough to reverse the direction of the waves, and hell followed after. There was no escape, no defence. Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses. ([Location 2453](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2453)) - Wherever they roam, humans leave residue. Not just litter and pollution, or rusted old cars, or cigarette butts, but stuff that leaks out of their minds. Hopes, needs, memories. Once a human has stood in a place or passed through it, it’s never the same again. This is our way of leaving a scent, marking new territory, bringing the chaos of the unknown into our ken and under our control. It’s not a bad smell – it’s a bit like nutmeg, apparently, with a hint of old newspaper – but it never goes away. Vaneclaw, for all his legendary faults, had a nose for it. And thus also for the lack of it. ([Location 2465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2465)) - ‘Once upon a long ago,’ the Devil said, ‘the creatures here had a life that made sense. They lived in caves, as animals should. They survived in collections of families. Everybody knew each other. They understood a duty of care, or at least knew that if they did wrong it would be noticed and brought to account. Then things changed. They gathered in larger numbers, in villages and towns and cities. Nobody knew everybody any more. The shadows and back alleys grew dark, and sometimes ran with blood. People stopped knowing how to behave, and most of all they stopped remembering why. They needed reasons to toe the line, and that was what they were given. Two reasons. Heaven, and Hell. Equal in resonance and moment. No one will ever be able to tell whether it has been the promise of Heaven or the threat of Hell that has kept this world from teetering into chaos ten thousand times. That is why Hell matters, and that’s why the power of black deeds must always be directed there. Without evil there is no good, and without Hell’s focusing lens there can be no true evil – just a great deal of extremely poor behaviour.’ ([Location 2606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2606)) - There are too many things to avoid. Too many places we’ve all been together, too many things we’ve done. I can’t turn my back on them forever just because it’s painful the first time. If I take out everything that used to be me, or you-and-me and our family, all that’s left is loading the dishwasher and chasing deadlines and that’s no way to live. ([Location 2750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2750)) - I know Mom and Dad’s work probably seems dumb to you sometimes. Just a way of us not being there.’ ([Location 2765](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=2765)) - One of the perilous things about being an adult is there comes a point where the doors of your mind open far wider than required by your own concerns. There’s no ceremony when this occurs, and no warning. It simply happens one day and suddenly you find there are seventy things going on at once and you’re flinching amidst a maelstrom of love and lost opportunities and hard choices and the tenacious grasping hands of the past, not to mention tidying the garage. Adults are not distracted for the sake of it, so cut them a little slack. They’re all searching for the brake to stop the world spinning, so they can take a moment and catch their breath. ([Location 3533](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=3533)) - A man called Nietzsche once observed that there is no such thing as moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of them. The Devil had a certain amount of time for Nietzsche, despite the moustache. He’d understood. We look at a squirrel and say it is jumping; but we might as well think about a jump in its essence, and claim that the jump is squirrelling. We do bad things, in other words, but the bad things also do us. This is almost never a successful defence in a court of law, but it’s true. ([Location 4045](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4045)) - She didn’t have a home any more. The building remained but everything that had made it her refuge and egg and comfort blanket had been stolen away. There was no laughter, only echoes; no conversation, only two-thirds of an attempt to fill silence; no music except the kind you could play with one hand. It was lack and nope and not-any-more. Her house itself was the Behind. Its sad, silent heart. ([Location 4187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4187)) - Calculations, decisions, always weighing the future instead of the present, worrying about the second and third acts when the first is still going on all around you. Welcome to adulthood. Please leave your dreams at the door. ([Location 4238](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4238)) - Kristen explained that occasionally girls had to be the bad guys, because bad guys are often just normal guys doing things that happen to hurt someone else’s feelings; that life is short, and all you can do is take it page by page or even line by line; and that, as Steve had put it to Kristen recently, in their least shouty lunch so far, you are only bound in the same book as those you love, not always and forever on the same page. ([Location 4440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4440)) - The truth is neither of us are real, Hannah. Not in the way that trees are real. We’re what happens between you and other people, the ups and downs on the swing, the sunny days and dark nights. He’s the blank page, I’m the words – or perhaps it’s the other way around. I’ll forgive your trespasses, but he understands them. I’m yes, he’s no – but the wheel of yin and yang spins so fast that cold black and white blur into a living grey. There is never only this, or that. There are all the things in between. Humans will always charge where angels fear to tread. And life goes on.’ ([Location 4507](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4507)) - So there were gaps and edges in Hannah’s life. Glimpses of the Behind. That’s OK. She could fill them. If Dad was quiet sometimes she could cheer him up, as he did with her. He’d been happy before. He would be again, and some days already was. Hannah realized that, weird though life had become, it was a good weird sometimes. That the days on which you despair are as much a part of life as the ones on which you laugh or get ice cream – and often more valuable in the long run. No, you don’t get to rub anything out. But you can always turn the page and write something new. ([Location 4538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4538)) - We all serve the fates. Life will happen to us come what may. Not everyone gets to be a grandparent, but we’re all someone’s grandchild. We have no choice therefore but to carry someone else’s weight, enacting their long-ago choices and duties of care. There’s no point blaming others for what happens next, however: responsibility for shaping and unearthing our stories, following the bouncing squirrel of our destinies, lies with us alone. Our victories and losses, our gains and lacks, the challenges we decline and those we accept – all resonate through the generations that follow. Nothing ever ends, and no one truly dies. ([Location 4552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01MQLOF1U&location=4552))