“He had a reservoir of tolerance for pain. Finite, though. Pain would empty it, eventually.”

“Pain revealed the paltry dimensions of love. The paltry dimensions of everything, in fact, except pain.”

“Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing . . .”

“He'd seen her not really recognising him, not really, when it came down to it, caring who he was. It was disgusting, that pain could do that. What was the point of it, except to shame and disgust everyone? To make a mockery of love? If that was God then fuck God, whether there was a reason for it or not. If there was a reason then fuck the reason. No kind of reason he was interested in any more.”

“She was afraid of us moving in together. With Mark, domestic intimacy had become domestic claustrophobia; and had riddled romance (though she never quite said this) like woodworm. It wasn't that she was resistant to the glamourlessness of stray toenails and washing up and underpants and mug-rings and hoovering and boredom; on the contrary: it was that she was horrified by her own willingness to sink so deeply into the comfort of such details. A no nonsense streak in her identified the ordinary with truth, the exotic with delusion. She and Mark had delighted in dehumbugging their own romance, had (she confessed) Larkinized themselves into mundanity addicts. In Mark's case (she suspected) because he knew deep down he had no magic in him; in her own because she knew deep down that she had too much (no nonsense streak or not), and that to release it would be to lose him - and perhaps herself. Therefore they had wallowed together in cosiness, both suffering, Mark for fear of her leaving him, her for fear (certainty, actually) that the romantic inside her would rise up and smash their deadening familiarity to pieces.”

“How to describe hell? Disembowelled landscape busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain and the din of...if only, hell is two things: the absence of God and the presence of time. Infinite variations on that theme. Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, trust me.”

“For almost a decade I was haunted by the memory of Deborah Black, I was about to claim. But the memory didn't haunt me; I haunted the memory. Went to it, at night or in the deadened hours of empty afternoons, woke it up, reminded it of all the fun we'd had, made it do things with me.”