“Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.”

“It was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it.”

“Competing in an Olympics didn't scare her now. The thought of stepping up into the full roar of the crowd, in London, seemed simple and natural and good. It was ordinary days now that frightened her - endless Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons of real life, the days you had to steer through without the benefit of handlebars. Off the bike she was like a smoker without cigarettes, never sure what to do with her hands. As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions - like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere - when all she'd ever trained it to do was pump blood.”

“If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain to them how it was possible to be drowning in a river of people and also feel so very, very alone.”

“...to survive, you must look good or talk even better.”

“That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.”

“When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.”