“Love always,Always,Tom”

“Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better”

“Come here,” she says.“No, you come here.”“I said it first.”“Rock paper scissors.”“No. Because you’ll do nerdy calculations and work out what I chose the last six times and then you’ll win.”Will pushes away from the table and his hand snakes out and he pulls her toward him and Tom figures that Will was always going to go to her first.”

“I wish everyone would stop crying, Tom. Uncle Joe would be so angry about it." But she's crying herself now. "He'd be so angry at us, Tom, for crying so much when all he did was laugh.”

“There’s a moment in [Anne of Green Gables] where Anne Shirley (great character) […] is in the same classroom as Gilbert Blythe and she hit’s him over the head with a slate, which is their kind of writing tool, and I always say that moment for me was just, I was just absolutely mesmerised. I thought it was so romantic, though she hated his guts. I would always say that in every one of my novels there is a moment where my characters metaphorically hit their potential love interests over the head with a slate. It could be that winning an argument or getting the upper hand, an example in say The Piper’s Son could be here’s Tom thinking it will be easy, text messaging Tara saying ‘How’s it going, babe’ and her response, that for me is the hitting someone over the head with a slate. It happens in Saving Francesca when she kind of meets Will and Will’s such a bastard to her. So they’re moments I kind of adopted and I loved that particular one, so I would say [L.M. Montgomery] was a major influence.”

“Worse still, he doesn’t know how to follow the piper anymore because it’s a path Tom has lost faith in.And the piper knows it. Tom can see it in his father’s eyes now. And the more he stares, the clearer it becomes.”

“Logical Tom begs emotional stupid dickhead Tom not to ask the question.'Are you alone?' he asks quietly.He hears her breathing so close to his ear.'Yes.''Good,' he says, his voice croaky. 'I'll sleep like a baby.”