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?

He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know. This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today. And then it was over.

These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another.

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.

He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.