“Sometimes, I said, a lie is the way of least pain for everyone.”

“How is it possible to exist with so much pain?”

“Sometimes i still think about when we used to fight and I feel really bad because if I'd known what was going to happen to her, I would have tried to be nice to her every day. I say 'try' because it's quite hard to be nice to someone every day. Even my mum gets on my nerves sometimes but I'm always nice to her because I know she's still sad, and because I'm all she has left.”

“Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.”

“I had been wrong when I said Liza McCullen wasn't beautiful: when she smiled she was stunning.”

“I wondered if she knew that everything she said made the other person feel like an idiot. I wondered if it was something she'd actually cultivated deliberately. I didn't think I could ever manage to make someone feel inferior.”

“But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting.”