I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.

Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.