“Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.”

“I’ll wait for you. Come back.The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now.It was clear enough - one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion.Waiting.Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.”

“She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.”

“It's hilarious to recognize how completely another person resembles your imperfect self.”

“Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretations are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.”

“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.”

“The following day the editor presided over a sudued meeting with his senior staff. Tony Montano sat to one side, a silent observer. "It's time we ran more regular columns. They're cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You've seen that sort of thing. Goes to a party and can't remember anyone's name. Twelve hundred words.""Sort of naval gazing," Jeremy Ball suggested."Not quite. Gazing is too intellectual. More like naval chat.”