“A large battalion of my thoughts was marching determinedly on its way to Annoyance but it was distracted and took a wrong turn at Adam and found, to its surprise, that it had ended up in the entirely different destination of Dreamy Contentment.”

“I forced myself to stop thinking about it. I went to the room in my brain where all my thoughts about Adam lived and disconnected the electricity and boarded up all the doors and windows, so nothing could get out.Obviously it was very unsightly. There were bound to be complaints from the neighboring thoughts. But I had no choice.”

“Waiting to be 'better' is the wrong approach. It's learning to live with it.”

“It's not like you take the right turning and you get everlasting happiness and you take the wrong one and your life's a disaster. In real life it's often impossible to tell which decision is the one you should make because what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose are sometimes-often-neck and neck.”

“The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look." Claire (Watermelon)”

“I wished there was some kind of switch on my brain. That I could turn it off in the same way that I could turn off the television. Just click it off and immediately empty my mind of all these images and worrying thoughts. And simply leave a blank screen. Or if I could just remove my head and put it on the bedside table and forget about it until morning. And then attach it again when I needed it.”

“People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don't. And it doesn't matter if the sickness is cancer or if it's depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all; if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on how robust you are, you will be alive. Or you will be dead.”