“If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.”

“Alice doesn't seem to mind because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it;s like some mating ritual on a wildlife program.”

“She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.”

“She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man”

“For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .”

“She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.”

“She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.”