“The introduction was meant to be all important and elegant and meaningful and “This summer marks the voyage of discovery of Livia Stowe,” and instead all I’m doing is writing about the plane crashing and when they find my laptop the only message I’ll have left for my loved ones and the good of humanity is “Oh, noooooo, we’re all going to die! It was the turkeys!” They will know that I knew about the loose bit on the wing. And didn’t tell anyone. Okay, everything’s smoothing out again now. The flap is still flapping, but we’ve made it through the flying turkeys, and the plane has stopped bumping. The flight attendants still don’t seem bothered, so I think maybe I’m not going to die today.”

“Well,” Adam said, leaning back and sighing, “I’ve got that out of my system now. I can leave you alone for the rest of the day. I always say, if you kiss the girl at the start of the date, it takes the pressure off.” “Oh, really, is that what you always say?” I said.“Always. It’s my golden rule. I’ve literally been saying it since…since I met you again in Princeton. Well, I suppose it came a bit after that. I’vedefinitely been saying it all morning.”

“Well, you get to know yourself better. You write about events when they happen to you, but then later you can read what you said about them, and enough time has passed for you to not remember exactly how you were feeling at the time, and you can see where you’ve gone wrong, or right. It’s always surprising—your attitude always changes. Maybe it was a huge deal at the time and now you have no idea why it upset you.”

“Maybe I just left it too late, and things changed too much for us to go back to where we were.”

“She left me at the worst possible time because I knew her enough to know I was completely in love with her, but she didn't leave me with enough memories.”

“Unrequited love is like buying a dress that you can’t fit into but you promise yourself you’ll diet for—you can’t think about the dress, only about the fact that your body is too big for it.”

“The hardest part is being brave so that nobody knows that you are sad all the time.”