In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan.

If you talk to geneticists they are constantly finding that your genes are being switched on and off because of the environment. Genes alone do not determine an exact path in your life.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

Yes, you need a passport to prove to the world that you exist. The people at passport control, they cannot look at you and see you are a person. No! They have to look at a little photograph of you. Then they believe you exist.

The worst thing about religion was religious people.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.