"Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract."

“Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.”

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.”

“Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.”

“We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.”

“On a recent Sunday evening, Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, "When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in – you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto – think small.”

“He had once felt light on the ground. He used to think his life was an open-ended adventure, he used to give things away, it amused him when the unexpected happened, benevolent coincidences used to bear him along. When had all that stopped?”