“Suki is the nation’s ideal girlfriend, a woman for whom bubbliness is a way of life, verging on a disorder.”
“I cannot have this Imelda Marcos woman beating me, whoever she is,’ Suki shrugged by way of explanation.”
“Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self -- to the mediating intellect-- as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.”
“Belief in an ideal dies hard. I had believed in an ideal for all the twenty-eight years of my life – the ideal of the British way of life.”
“No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.”
“But in real life, the ideal Parisian woman is calm, discreet, a bit remote, and extremely decisive.”