The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.

A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.

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.

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

I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.

I love him, she thought. I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him. I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it.

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