I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.

Dying in unfamiliar surroundings miles away from home, it cannot possibly be good. There is a great sadness about that I think.

Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.

By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.

Above all, she wanted to look as though she had not given the matter a moment's thought, and that would take time.

She lay in the dark and knew everything.