“He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your hair and it looks like old rope.”

“... He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.”

“When you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.”

“He had never spoken to Uncle Richard, but he knew that he was a radiologist who put tubes into people's groins and pushed them up into their brains to clear blockages like chimney sweeps did and this was a glorious idea.”

“And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?"And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.”

“I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”

“I cooked his meals. I cleaned his clothes. I looked after him every weekend. I look after him when he was ill. I took him to the doctor. I worried myself sick everytime he wandered off somewhere at night. I went to school every time he got into a fight. And you? What? You wrote him some fucking letters.”