“It was a strangely disorienting feeling, to have something you'd relied on for so long start to change, like finding out that gravity no longer worked on Mondays.”

“Life is perphas after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is perculiar and inexplicable. We are constanly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change-sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once- and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment.”

“Beauty fades so you'd better work at having something more to offer.”

“It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.”

“I knew exactly what you'd done. I know that feelings. You have to do something. You have to change something radically, because you can't stay like you are for another second, or you're going to explode.”

“Happiness is a habit, it isn't something that comes with new clothes. It's something you have to work at. So, start smiling and get out and take some exercise”