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

Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life.

Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.

Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.

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.

All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.

For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .