As a former ballerina, I can't put down Maggie Shipstead's new book, Astonish Me.

My core belief is that if you're complaining about something for more than three minutes, two minutes ago you should have done something about it.

Self-harm - the world will come at you with knives anyway. You do not need to beat them to it.

When a woman says, ‘I have nothing to wear!’, what she really means is, ‘There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.

Always remember that, nine times out of ten, you probably aren’t having a full-on nervous breakdown – you just need a cup of tea and a biscuit. You’d be amazed how easily and repeatedly you can confuse the two. Get a big biscuit tin.

I cannot understand antiabortion arguments that center on the sanctity of life. As a species, we’ve fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don’t believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain, and lifelong, grinding poverty show us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we’ve made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.