So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

He didn't like it all that much when he first came - all the rubbish and the rush - but it was growing on him, it wasn't half bad. Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn't matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.

That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.