tenderly, it seemed almost painfully, they smiled at one another saying nothing, and their questions were the same, am i the one you think about, when we made love were you happy, have i hurt you, do you love me, will you always.

when i look at the paintings i don't always recognise her as beautiful right away. her beauty is something i have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work, and maybe that's what manet found so fascinating about it.

i know that if i really had any talent i would have done something with my life by now – i don't delude myself about that. if i tried i'm sure i would fail and that's why i've never tried.

she laughed, and through the door her laughter was softened and musical.

i had already become the person i had once longed to be, and now energetically despised.

if novelists wrote honestly about their own lives, no one would read novels.

eileen was thinking also of childhood, one of lola's make-believe games, a hidden kingdom, palaces, dukes and peasants, enchanted rivers, forests, lights in the sky. all the twists and turns were lost now, the invested names in magic languages, the loyalties and betrayals.

we'll always be in each other's lives and we'll always have this feeling between us, and it's better.

not many people would be happy, thinking about life the way you do – that it's all for nothing, and there isn't any meaning. most people prefer to believe there is some. so in that sense, everyone is deluded.

i know that it's not the life you imagined for me, alice – buying a house and having children with a boy i grew up with. it's not the life i used to imagine for myself either. but it's the life i have, the only one.

just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older. never to move, never to board a plane again, just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. what else is life for?

what if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal? what if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always – just to live and be with other people?

to be really honest, i actually think it's more the fact that i like you. and then when you act badly it drives me up the wall.

in the darkness the main room of the apartment lay quiet again and still. two empty bowls had been left in the sink, two spoons, an empty water glass with a faint print of clear lip balm on the rim.

and it seems telling that this meaning of the word 'beauty' signifies something so profoundly ugly

i keep encountering this person, who is myself, and i hate her with all my energy. i hate her ways of expressing herself, i hate her appearance, and i hate her opinions about everything. and yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me.

he was smiling to himself. well, it's my fault for spoiling her, he said. i'm a terrible fool about her, really.

you've done much more for me, really, than i've ever done for you. and i've needed you more. i do need you more, a lot more, than you need me.

i felt a bit like that after my mam died. i just started thinking, what's the fucking point of life, you know? it's not like there's anything at the end of it. not that i really wanted to be dead or anything, but i couldn't be fucked being alive for most the time either.

i know i am lucky in so many ways. and when i forget that, i just remind myself of the fact that felix is alive, and you are, and simon is, and then i feel wonderfully and almost frighteningly lucky