If you say a word, it leaps out and becomes the truth. I love you. I believe it. I believe I am loveable. How can something as fragile as a word build a whole world?

People think me a sort of Florence Nightingale, but I have no heroic qualities. I simply don’t feel very much.

I hope you don’t mind my joining you,” said Leanne. I minded. After all, she’d tried to kill me. A girl in a novel would say it was hard to believe, but it wasn’t.

Thoughts are strange creatures. They lead you from one thing to another. Sometimes you don’t know how you got from one to the next.

The boy shall have a proper beating,' said Cecil. 'But I beat him already,' I said, 'and don't tell me I didn't do it properly. I'm touchy about these things.

Our English monarchs are so unimaginative,” said Eldric. “They execute people in such tediously conventional ways.

The beach has a language of its own, with its undulating ribbons of silt, the imponderable hieroglyphs of bird tracks. The receding waves catch on innumerable holes in the sand. Bubbles form and fade. A new language, with a new alphabet.