“She revisited sex now as a ruined project she couldn't entirely give up on.”

“The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.”

“She turned towards me, put her fingertips against my chest. She was enjoying it somewhat, too, the little betrayal of Mark's memory. She still loved him, differently; now and again there must be these retrospective cruelties, to consolidate her newness, to let her not love him in the old way.”

“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.”

“For the love of Mary, I get it, she's got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try'n get back into it.”

“I know what the majority of you think about all this. All this sex and money and drugs. You think: people who live like that never end up happy. You need to think that in just the way men with small penises need to think size doesn't matter. It's understandable. The rich, the famous, the big-dicked, the slim-and-gorgeous - they can incite an envy so urgent that you can escape it only by translating it into pity. People who live like that never end up happy. Yes, you're right. But neither do you. And in the meantime, they've had all the sex and drugs and money.”

“I'll tell you something,' she said. 'I'm not sure I ever really liked him.' Adam?' I said. 'I don't blame you.' 'Not Adam,' she said, struggling to swallow a greedily chomped chunk. 'God.”