“As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.”

“I love that sound,' he mumbled into her hair. 'Blackbirds at dawn.''I hate it. Makes me think I've done something I'll regret.”

“The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a different. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Carona electric typewriter and work hard at ... something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. East sensibly. Stuff like that.”

“You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of confidence. Either that or a scented candle”

“Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.”

“She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most.”

“Sorry' he said. 'No, I'm sorry.' 'What are you sorry for?' 'Rattling on like a mad old cow. I'm sorry, I'm tired, bad day, and I'm sorry for being so...boring.' 'You're not that boring.' 'I am, Dex. God, I swear I bore myself.' 'Well, you don't bore me.' He took her hand in his. 'You could never bore me. You're one in a million, Em.”