“Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.”

“There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest. And the girls will be picked up from school, and dropped off again in the morning. Your eldest daughter can remember her inhaler, and your youngest will take her gym kit with her, and it is just as you suspected - most of the stuff that you do is just stupid, really stupid, most of the stuff you do is just nagging and whining and picking up for people who are too lazy to love you.”

“I have no place left to live but in my own heart.”

“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead”

“I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.”

“I see her on a Sunday after lunch, and we spend a pleasant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like water.”

“And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.”