“You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad--very bad--and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.”

“I romanticised Mancunian despair, W says. I didn't realise that Mancunian despair is only the desire to leave Manchester”

“A comma . . . catches the gentle drift of the mind in thought, turning in on itself and back on itself, reversing, redoubling, and returning along the course of its own sweet river music; while the semicolon brings clauses and thoughts together with all the silent discretion of a hostess arranging guests around her dinner table.”

“So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.”

“The usual heresy consists in denying the existence of a god who has created us. It is a much more interesting heresy to imagine that possibly a god has created us and then to say that there isn't the least reason for us to be impressed by that fact. And certainly not to be thankful for it.”

“the secret of life is not to do what you like but to like what you do”

“You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly, that you'll never really make it back into the light.”