In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it's easier, isn't it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.

To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.

As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.

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

Be nice wont you?" "I am nice, I'm always nice." "But not too nice. I mean don't make a religion out of it, niceness.

Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.