Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

...and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.

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.

Be good. Do something good.