“A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvelous for the stone and marvelous for the teacher.”

“We look so very different from the way we sound. It’s a shock, similar to hearing your own voice for the first time, when you’re forced to wonder how the rest of you comes across if you sound nothing like the way you think you sound. You feel dislodged from the old shoe of yourself.”

“And when is it ever convincing, the belief others have in your abilities? You know perfectly well they can't see the mess inside you.”

“You stand next to the sea and you're in touch with all your longings and all your losses.”

“You see the same plain landscape day after day, and then one day, perhaps it's the play of light or the time of year, you find it beautiful and other landscapes at fault. So it must be with fashion. Ordinary judgement falls into abeyance and something else, some bewitchment, takes over. How else to explain the appeal of garments that in a few years look so ridiculous?”

“She would always be careful around people like Parley Burns, tricky people who are thin skinned and punitive and intelligent and surprisingly honest.”

“How attraction works, making one's body almost painfully alive and one's thoughts concentrated, also painfully. And the truth of these powerful attractions - they have their own morality and nothing else matters.”