“She was like a camera that had been chronically out of focus until someone came by and twisted the lenses into alignment.”

“She doesn't like to talk about him, and I know that she hasn't been the same since he died. She's not quite here anymore; there's something missing in all of her smiles, like a blurry spot or a camera lens out of focus. Part of her followed him, wherever it was he went.”

“At that moment a very good thing was happening to her. Four good things had happened to her, in fact, since she came to Misselthwaite Manor. She had felt as if she had understood a robin and that he had understood her; she had run in the wind until her blood had grown warm; she had been healthily hungry for the first time in her life; and she had found out what it was to be sorry for someone.”

“Judging by the photograph it seemed like I hadn’t been there at all. As if it was my camera that had been on holiday, and not me.”

“Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.”

“You could BE somebody," he said, focusing a tight shot on her face. "Honey," she said, mugging for the camera like an old time movie queen, "I already am somebody.”