“Even if we had to go back, I decided it was worth it to ride that bus all the way out here. It was worth it just for Natalie to see the windmills. Even if she never saw anything like this again. Maybe at least she could hang on to the idea that there's something better out there, somewhere.”

“All of the heartache, the anger, the fear that this was as good as it was ever going to get, was worth it. Here, he could see her eyes and bask in her smiles-even when she wasn't smiling for him. Every day was worth the pain.”

“I need to know that there even is such a thing as okay, or maybe not just okay, maybe even good, and it's out there and we just haven't found it yet. There's got to be a happier ending than this, here. There's got to be a better story. Because we deserve one. You deserve one. Even if it doesn't end with you coming back to me. --Josh”

“I don't care anymore. Even if she never speaks to me again because of the press, she's worth it. She makes me a person, not just a wish granter.”

“She told the truth as she saw it, and she died for it. I came along for the ride, and I lived. It wasn't worth it. But it was the truth, and it was what had to happen.”

“But later, just as we're turning the corner into my road, and I'm beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Saturday-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed... what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, *going out of her way*, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you're with someone permanently, you don't get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn't, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.”