“Travelling', she sighed.'So predictable.''What's wrong with travelling?''Avoiding reality more like.''I think reality is over-rated,' he said in the hope that this might come across as dark and charismatic.”

“I think reality is over-rated.”

“I think reality is overrated.”

“And then she frowned, and shook her head, then put her arms around him once more, pressing her face into his shoulder, making a noise that sounded almost like rage.'What's up?' he asked.'Nothing. Oh, nothing. Just...' She looked up at him. 'I thought I'd finally got rid of you.''I don't think you can.' he said”

“He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he 'thinks he might be in love with her', which is both more touching and easier to back out of.”

“I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.''Treated like what?'She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. 'Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.”

“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.”