“I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.”

“Even more, I had never meant to love him. One thing I truly knew - knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest - was how love gave someone the power to break you”

“Broody Mace looks pleased?” I asked. We all knew what that meant. Been there done that, had the t-shirt.Stella had been laid.”

“I knew what she meant, and in that moment felt as though I had shaken off some of the dust and grit of ten dry years; then and always, however she spoke to me, in half sentences, single words, stock phrases of contemporary jargon, in scarcely perceptible movements of eyes or lips or hands, however inexpressible her thought, however quick and far it had glanced from the matter in hand, however deep it had plunged, as it often did, straight from the surface to the depths, I knew; even that day when I still stood on the extreme verge of love, I knew what she meant.”

“I love to kill fish,' Sayle went on. 'But when I saw this specimen of Physalia physalis, I knew I had to capture it and keep it. You see, it reminds me of myself.''It's ninety-nine per cent water. It has no brain, no guts and no anus.' Alex had dredged up the facts from somewhere and spoken them before he knew what he was doing.”

“Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.”