You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.

He's a better person when she's around, and isn't that what friends are for, to raise you up and keep you at your best?

Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don't get carried away.

But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

You must do what you enjoy.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show?