I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea.

I like novelists who can create other interesting worlds.

And if these incidents now seem full of significance and all of a piece, it's probably because I'm looking at them in the light of what came later.

You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

If you were a boy and a girl and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you. They sorted it out so you could have a few years together before you began your donations.

The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.