“Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.”

“I'm trying to be inspiring! I'm trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you!”

“In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.”

“I love him, she thought. I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him. I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it.”

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”

“and not for the first time she felt a reassuring shiver of dislike for him.”

“No Scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored.”