All his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under [her] constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.

I've only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.

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.

As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.

Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?

She shouldn't speak her thoughts; nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.

Work hard at . . . something.