Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me?

As a matter of fact, I think there are more things important in life than "relationships.

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

At some point you’ll have to get serious about life.

…and you smile back and try not to think about the fact that you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to say to each other.

This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.

She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man