This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle
You can live your whole life not realizing that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.
Call me sentimental, but there’s no-one in the world that I’d like to see get dysentery more than you
This is me.’” He handed her the precious scrap of paper. ‘Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose if you phone first.
Happyish. Well, happyish isn’t so bad.”It’s the most we can hope for.
He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.
What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.
the crucial thing about an education is the opportunity tat it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley
Okay, well I think the programme is like being screamed at for an hour by a drunk with a strobe-light, but like I said–
A moment passed, perhaps half a second when their faces said what they felt, and then Emma was smiling, laughing, her arms around his neck.
If you’re my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can’t, and if I can’t talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?
I’m just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.”Treated like what?’She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. ‘Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.
No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.
Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead? It was unrealistic to expect a friendship to last forever…
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will.’ Her lips touched his cheek. ‘I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.
You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it’s enough to tell a few good jokes.
Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.
Keep the change,” he smiled. Was there ever a more empowering phrase than “Keep the change”?
Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we’d actually “done it properly,” which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.
And is that what love looks like — all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?””Sometimes it is.
Maybe they’re in love.””And is that what love looks like – all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?””Sometines it is.
Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed the most.
I applied for the University of Life. Didn’t get the grades.
There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.
You can live your whole life not realising that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.
And there it is again, the look. There’s no doubt about it, if Sylvie had a receipt, she would have taken him back by now; this one’s gone wrong. It’s not what I wanted.
He swatted at her with his book. “Shut up and read, will you?”He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.
Who’s he seeing now then?””No idea. They’re like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long.
You should visit the Palatine. It’s at the top of that hill . . .””I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.””Yes, who was emperor back then?
…grief is as much about regret for what you’ve never had as sadness for what you’ve lost.
There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.
Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness.
It’s scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?””It’s meant to be lavender.””No, Dex – it’s money. It smells of money.
From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions – fear, desire, anger – serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .
Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.
Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.
Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.
Generally speaking, I resolve to change my life on average maybe thirty to forty times a week, usually at about two a.m, drunk, ore early the next morning, hungover.
The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.
The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.
You’re gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the girl of confidence. Either that or a scented candle.
Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I’ll always remember it
The unrequited love of ones’ only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn
What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice, said Connie’s voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.
[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there’s always a little cynical undertone, there’s always something that undercuts things.
There’s no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it’s hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of ‘Great Expectations,’ even among the minor characters.