Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.

Now, bitterly, with one sweep of the front door, the compassion was spent. To the degree that Lawrence's face was familiar, it was killingly so - as if she had been gradually getting to know him for over nine years and then, bang, he was known. She'd been handed her diploma. There were no more surprises - or only this last surprise, that there were no more surprises. To torture herself, Irina kept looking, and looking, at Lawrence's face, like turning the key in an ignition several times before resigning herself that the battery was dead.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

I never, ever took you for granted. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary.