“It's about thinking that being blond & slim & perfect will automatically bring you happiness, & then discovering that life is as full of as many disappointments as there were before. ”

“To be honest, I'm not sure about this whole scared of commitment business. I think it's become too handy, a useful phrase that men can bandy about whenever they feel like being assholes. And sure, I do believe there are some men who are genuinely terrified of commitment, but there aren't that many, and for the most part I think it's that they haven't met the right woman yet. Because if a man, no matter how scared he professed to be, met the woman of his dreams, he wouldn't want to let her go, would he? And sure, he might not want to actually get married, but if he were madly in love and risked losing her, he'd do it, wouldn't he?That's what I think, anyway.”

“I'm not sure that insecurity is a good enough excuse for that sort of behavior. We're all insecure, and I really think he's old enough to have discovered the reasons behind his insecurity, and do something about them."...Lucy”

“Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways”

“And suddenly I realize that although I've never thought about being in love with Nick before, all the right ingredients are there. I fancy him. I like him. He's my friend. He makes me laugh. I love being with him. And I start to feel all sort of warm and glowy, and screw the other stuff. Screw the stuff about him having no money, and living in a bedsit, and not being what I thought I wanted. I'm just going to go with this and see where it ends up. I mean, no one says I have to marry the guy, for God's sake.”

“On the way back to the office- I get a cab, on expenses, naturally- I decide that I could quite like Ed. Maybe I could even fancy him, and maybe the fact that I'm not thinking about him that much when I'm not with him is a good thing, maybe it means this is a proper relationship, not just lust, or the equivalent to a teenage crush. Because quite frankly I'm sick of falling madly in love and spending twenty-four hours a day thinking about them and crying with misery when they don't phone. I'm sick of being the kind of girl who, when they say jump, says how high. I'm sick of always, always being the one to fall in love and get hurt. And maybe this is how it should be, getting on with my life and not putting all my energies into a relationship.”

“It's all well and good saying you avoid pain by avoiding relationships, but what about the wonderful things you're avoiding as well? What about the joy and the intimacy and the trust that come with finding someone you love?”