Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.' 'It's the most we can hope for.

The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.

This isn't a letter, it's a gift.

For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .

And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.