“I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.”
―
Caroline O'Donoghue,
The Rachel Incident
“When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Our company is teeming with women under thirty, and men approaching or over fifty. That is how the food chain works. Dozens of attractive young women do the grunt work for a handful of men, and the women get filtered out by motherhood. It is the corporate version of natural selection.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, Promising Young Women
“Anything people come together to believe in is real. Intense, passionate energy that is focused on one spot will create something.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“She learned to listen for the right sounds by tuning the wrong sounds out, and it had a permanent effect on her personality. If someone says something she doesn’t want to hear, she simply decides not to hear it.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“We ran into them at a Goldfrapp gig. They attended it the way I go to gigs with my own husband now—fun, dinner first, home by eleven, something to do. There’s only a short stretch in your life where you can attend gigs with spiritual commitment.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Lily isn't dirty, per se; it's just that she doesn't really like to live in her body. She doesn't like to notice it. If she could just be a brain in a jar, reading books and drawing, she'd be much happier.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Turning people against one another is a very good distraction technique while you accumulate power.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Gifts That Bind Us
“I think . . . when you’re looking for things that are out of place,” she says softly, “you see all the things that already are.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“I was afraid, really, of being the main character in my own life. I choose to be someone that things happen to, because it was easier than being someone who made things happen.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, Promising Young Women
“There's a kind of glamour to be chosen, I think. I understand it, but it still makes me feel sick.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“I had always been brought up to think of plastic trees as tacky, that big dogs were better than small dogs, that potato waffles were common. So many of my beliefs about the world had been predicated on our once having had money.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Perhaps it’s because so many people claim Irishness that we keep putting our private jokes on higher and higher shelves, so you have to ask a member of staff to get them down for you.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“We, in that way siblings do for outsiders, tried to make a travelling circus out of our childhood. Stories about old holiday rentals and falling out of trees.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“I was angry at her for not recognising that I was no longer a simple intern, but I know that wasn’t everything. There was something spikier, crueller, underneath it. I was fond of Deenie Harrington, but in my head I had normalised that it was okay to do bad things to her. Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“When something good happens to you at that age, you can’t settle with the notion that it’s a one-off. You want it to be the beginning of a tradition. That’s how I felt about that night: I wanted it already to be a memory, a foundational one, a first evening of many similar evenings. I wanted future nostalgia, a rear-view, years-old fondness for something that had literally just happened.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Our company is teeming with women under thirty, and men approaching or over fifty. That is how the food chain works. Dozens of attractive young women do the grunt work for a handful of men, and the women get filtered out by motherhood. It is the corporate version of natural selection.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, Promising Young Women
“Anything people come together to believe in is real. Intense, passionate energy that is focused on one spot will create something.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“She learned to listen for the right sounds by tuning the wrong sounds out, and it had a permanent effect on her personality. If someone says something she doesn’t want to hear, she simply decides not to hear it.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“We ran into them at a Goldfrapp gig. They attended it the way I go to gigs with my own husband now—fun, dinner first, home by eleven, something to do. There’s only a short stretch in your life where you can attend gigs with spiritual commitment.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Lily isn't dirty, per se; it's just that she doesn't really like to live in her body. She doesn't like to notice it. If she could just be a brain in a jar, reading books and drawing, she'd be much happier.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“He was a doctor and I was supposed to take what he said seriously; but he was a dentist and my dad so I didn’t.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Turning people against one another is a very good distraction technique while you accumulate power.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Gifts That Bind Us
“I think . . . when you’re looking for things that are out of place,” she says softly, “you see all the things that already are.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“I was afraid, really, of being the main character in my own life. I choose to be someone that things happen to, because it was easier than being someone who made things happen.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, Promising Young Women
“There's a kind of glamour to be chosen, I think. I understand it, but it still makes me feel sick.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, All Our Hidden Gifts
“I thought of my parents as heads on Easter Island, and it took moving two miles away to realise they had been people all along.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“I had always been brought up to think of plastic trees as tacky, that big dogs were better than small dogs, that potato waffles were common. So many of my beliefs about the world had been predicated on our once having had money.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“Perhaps it’s because so many people claim Irishness that we keep putting our private jokes on higher and higher shelves, so you have to ask a member of staff to get them down for you.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“We, in that way siblings do for outsiders, tried to make a travelling circus out of our childhood. Stories about old holiday rentals and falling out of trees.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
“I was angry at her for not recognising that I was no longer a simple intern, but I know that wasn’t everything. There was something spikier, crueller, underneath it. I was fond of Deenie Harrington, but in my head I had normalised that it was okay to do bad things to her. Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was.” ― Caroline O'Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
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