Why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live. … Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?

Dear God, teach me to be careless.

I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.

Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.

Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

Nothing can be repaired or advanced but only accepted

Watching Jamila sometimes made me think the world was divided into three sorts of people: those who knew what they wanted to do; those (the unhappiest) who never knew what their purpose in life was; and those who found out later on. I was in the last category, I reckoned, which didn't stop me wishing I'd been born into the first.