“Nothing that can be, can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.”

“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”

“come back, come back to me”

“Observing human variety can give pleasure, but so too can human sameness.”

“These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest.”

“He would change my life and behave with selfless cruelty as he prepared to set out on a journey with no hope of return.”

“Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.”