The Club
by Ellery Lloyd
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Club:
“We all have versions of ourselves we can bear to look at, versions we prepare for the world’s consumption, that we hope will make ourselves loved, allow us to be forgiven. Versions of our real selves that allow us to live with the things we have done.”
“In some respects it was a mistake, as a woman especially, to be really efficient over a long period of time. Because if you made things seem easy, and people had no experience of things not running smoothly, it came to seem that anybody could do it.”
“Suddenly everyone on Twitter was well versed on the safety features of the Defender 2020 Electric Land Rover, everyone on Facebook was an expert on the Blackwater Estuary’s currents and tides.”
“Maybe that was the point: that at a certain level, certainly as a man, it became a literal expression of your power, that you could wander around looking like that and people would still hang on your every word.”
“That there was some sort of justice involved, in watching some of these people- these terrible fucking human beings, these terrible fucking men- beg, grovel, face for the first time ever the consequences of their actions.”
“an open-plan multilayered interior like something M. C. Escher might have come up with after bingeing on too many copies of Architectural Digest,”
“... when you give people a mask, that’s when they show you what they really are.”
“That if you were a successful man there would always be these women, this particular kind of woman, that would throw herself at you. That it was one of the embarrassments of success, one of the downsides. I guess I just believed them.”
“Because really, isn’t that what power is? A middle-aged Rumpelstiltskin, jumping up and down, visibly out of breath, swinging on a chandelier, and no one daring to laugh. A grown man so cross with an oil painting of an old lady he looks as if he is about to burst the buttons off his shirt, and nobody daring to suggest he might be overreacting just a little.”
“That if you really wanted to do it, it was never too late to change your life. To follow your dreams. To be a better person. To start treating the people around you the way they deserved to be treated.”
“What a revelation, what a relief it had been to realize, at the age of about twelve perhaps, that her mother’s tempers were not actually something you could prevent. That no matter how quietly you walked or how carefully you cleaned up after yourself, or how studiously you tried to avoid attracting her attention, she would always be able to find something to lose her temper about. That did not make it any more pleasant to be in the eye of the storm of course, but what it did mean was that you stopped internalizing any of it. She heard a slam, looking up to see”
“What a revelation, what a relief it had been to realize, at the age of about twelve perhaps, that her mother’s tempers were not actually something you could prevent. That no matter how quietly you walked or how carefully you cleaned up after yourself, or how studiously you tried to avoid attracting her attention, she would always be able to find something to lose her temper about. That did not make it any more pleasant to be in the eye of the storm of course, but what it did mean”
“the 6:00 a.m. light was a hazy pink, purple, and gold, like a bruise spreading slowly upward across the sky.”
“Look, I had five years of almost constant touring in Sideways, fans screaming every night that they loved me, opening the hotel curtains in the morning to see them all still out there with handmade banners with hearts all over them. But I woke up one morning and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was exhausted, couldn’t sleep, was continually having panic attacks. Never saw my family. Didn’t have any friends apart from the other guys in the band. So I quit and sacked my management.”
“She had killed him, and she did not regret it at all.”
“When you give people a mask, that's when they show you what they really are.”
“Now and then she still, after all these months, found herself making a mental note of something to tell Adam, found herself thinking of something she wanted to ask him, then realizing with a sudden jolt of the heart that she couldn’t.”
“forever. There were experiences she and Adam had shared that she was now the only person to remember (that night in Rome, that terrible restaurant, the waiter with the dripping nose; that summer morning they had swum in the ocean, off Cape Cod; the first time they had made love), private jokes to which only she knew the punch line.”
“News is what someone, somewhere, wants suppressed—isn’t that what they said? Everything else is just”
“– in fact, the only thing she had ever really questioned was why you would not want to be surrounded by stars. But with no discernible skills in that direction – she couldn’t”
“The classic murder mystery ends with a neat set of motives, a culprit, and a comeuppance. Perhaps that is why we read them. Perhaps that is why we love them. Because real life offers us so few of these consolations, so few of these satisfactions.”
“News is what someone, somewhere, wants suppressed—isn’t that what they said? Everything else is just PR.”
“It’s not every day that you discover your whole adult life has been built around an elaborate practical joke.”
“The classic murder mystery ends with a neat set of motives, a culprit and a comeuppance. Perhaps that is why we read them. Perhaps that is why we love them. Because real life offers us so few of these consolations, so few of these satisfactions. Maybe one day a clue will be uncovered or a confession will come to light to offer us the sense of closure the books and the movies have taught us to expect, and to believe we deserve.”
“What a revelation, what a relief it had been to realize, at the age of about twelve perhaps, that her mother’s tempers were not actually something you could prevent. That no matter how quietly you walked or how carefully you cleaned up after yourself, or how studiously you tried to avoid attracting her attention, she would always be able to find something to lose her rag about. That did not make it any more pleasant to be in the eye of the storm of course, but what it did mean was that you stopped internalizing any of it.”
“... perhaps any tragedy seems to acquire a sense of inevitability.”
“It was one of those afternoons when time seems not just to be moving quicker than usual, but vanishing in great unexplained leaps and jumps.”
“About the girls, young girls, threatened into silence or paid off, the vast machinery of fear and manipulation and exploitation on which his father’s career had depended. And at first the camera kept cutting back and forth to faces in the audience. Angry faces. Frightened faces. And you could see the host standing in the corner of the stage, not knowing what to do or say, voices no doubt screaming in his ear.”
“Footage that would destroy what was left of the late Jackson Crane’s reputation and everything she had worked for in one fell swoop.”
“She had even thought about starting to introduce some inconsistencies so it would not look like she was sticking strictly to a carefully devised mental script.”
