“William got up and went over to the window. Outside, the autumn fields lay pleasingly striped with stubble and speckled with partridges.”

“Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference... I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.”

“The demon got up. The demon said Fool. To think you can eat their food and not talk to them. To think you can take their money and not be afraid of them. To think you can depend on their company and not suffer from them.”

“If I had a husband I should want a good one, a man with a head on his shoulders, and a heart. Even if I were young and good-looking, I doubt whether I could please myself. As it is I am likely to be taken bodily to heaven, as to become any man's wife.”

“There was but one thing for him;- to persevere till he got her, or till he had finally lost her. And should the latter be his fate, as he began to fear that it would be, then, he would live, but live only, like a crippled man.”

“The end of a novel, like the end of children’s dinner-party, must be made up of sweetmeats and sugar-plum”

“And it occurred to me; I was not part of the action. Oh God, I thought, I'm not an anthropologist. I'm the lonely voice-over narrator of adolescence. The bitter, voice-over voice.”