“I still hear the world spinning.”

“My ex calls the ochre winter 'autumn' as we queue to hear dock boys play jazz fugues in velvet dark.— Broken Verses”

“Can I ask you a personal question"? Of all the rhetorical questionsin the world, that is the one which irritates me most with itssimultaneous gesture towards and denial of the trespass that is aboutto follow.”

“This world is out of date”

“Her definition of romance was absentminded intimacy, the way someone else's hand stray to your plate of food.I replied: no, that's just friendship; romance is always knowing exactly where that someone else's hands are. She smiled and said, there was a time I thought that way, too. But at the heart of the romance is the knowledge that those hands may wander off elsewhere, but somehow through luck or destiny or plain blind groping they'll find a way back to you, and maybe you'll be smart enough then to be grateful for everything that's still possible, in spit of your own weaknesses- and his.”

“The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,’ Kim said. ‘Though it’s possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate.”

“Don't you know how much I hero-worshiped you when I was a kid? Youwere Marie Curie crossed with Emily Bronte crossed with Joan of Arc tome when I was ten. And when i told you that, you said my culturalreferences were the sign of a colonized mind.”