“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”

“Conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one - or a hired one, it matters not - to take you home.”

“Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?”

“Ayrs let long moments fall away. ‘You’re young, Frobisher, you’re rich, you’ve got a brain, and by all accounts you’re not wholly repugnant. I’m not sure why you stay on here.’……Couldn’t say if Ayrs felt humor, pity, nostalgia or scorn…Jocasta seemed angry with me. ‘What?’ I hissed. ‘My husband loves you,’ said the wife, dressing.”

“Two old people in a room devoid of furniture, steam rising from their teacups. They were motionless and expressionless. Waiting for something. I wish I could go into their room and sit down with them. I'd give them my Rolex for that. I wish they would smile, and pour me a cup of jasmine tea. I wish the world was like that.”

“Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree.”

“If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.”