“If this was a sandalwood pyre she would have thrown herself in and this paper she'd become would have caught fire and she and him could sail away like two birds.”

“What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.”

“He seemed so terribly weak. She would have had more respect for him if he'd told her to go fuck herself.' I have to go to sleep' she'd scathe.Then she'd roll over, and so would he. They'd be lying there like two strangers who just happened to be sharing the same bed. It was in those moments she began to plot her escape.”

“Beneath these was a small silver-edged photo album, and Emma breathed in at the sight of the engraved names: Tommy and Emma. She found herself smiling; she'd known somehow that he would have been a Tommy. And if he'd never had the chance to become any of the other things she'd imagined for him, she was happy that at least he'd had that.”

“She remembered when they were kids and he'd caught the rock that the bullies had thrown at her. At six, she'd considered him a hero.At sixteen, she considered him a heartbreaker.”

“On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back.”