Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.

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?

My 20s was a sea of worry. I worried about benefit forms, about being thrown out of my flat. I never went on holiday because I thought: 'What if an audition comes up?' I was a nervous wreck.

...Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.

Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you