“She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.”

“It was not often that she was alone like this and she did not like it. When she was alone she had to think and, these days, thoughts were not so pleasant.”

“Even if I thought he as perfect for her." She turned to face him. "What were we thinking?"

"We weren't," he said. "We were in love.”

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

“There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.”

“She had never thought about her name much before, but when he said it, it was as if she were hearing it for the first time - the hard T, the caress of the double S, the way it seemed to end on a breath.”

“In her businesslike way she thought that her life had begun when she was a very young woman and she really did look lovely: you knew it wouldn't last and you packed all you could into it — but men were different. A man like B — like Alfie, too — never got beyond the time when they were boys and, damn them, it kept them young.”

“she was glad she had been scarred. She said that whoever loved her now would love her true self, and not her pretty face.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“But when Anthony kissed her, she felt as
if she were losing her mind. And when he
kissed her twice, she wasn't even sure if she wanted it back!”