My biggest fear, I think falling from a great height. If I want to keep myself awake at night I imagine I'm on the top of the North or South Tower in 9/11, wondering whether I'm going to be burnt to death or I'm going to jump. And I think I would burn to death. And yet I'm impressed by the fact that hundreds didn't.

Looking after children is one of the ways of looking after yourself.

No one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath Briony bed, but no one wanted to know.

The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.

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.

Shall there be womanly times? Or shall we die?