It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.

[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.

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?

The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

The problem with all these fiercely individualistic girls was that they were all exactly the same.

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.

And they did have fun, though it was of different kind now. All that yearning and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.