The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.

There's something about the authenticity rather than the autobiography that makes my story and my pain move across and become your story and your pain.

She hated being a nobody and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents - we don't really have any choice.

Life was a pre-death experience.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won’t complain.

What kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, the bed unmade, to ignore you in the mornings, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call.