While at Oxford in 1999, I met Jonathan Fortier, who is a Montreal-born Canadian. Despite the challenges of a transatlantic relationship, we remained keen on each other and eventually married in 2002.

If you let go of me now,” I whispered, stretching against him, “it could be another six hundred years before you find me again. Are you willing to take that risk?

She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

Janice used to say that instinct was reason in a hurry; I was not so sure about the reason part.

...had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples.