“I don't want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in me.”

“If I had to ask him to ask me, it wasn't going to work as an expression of concern. Like when you ask someone if they love you - if you have to ask them, they don't. Or not enough. Not the way you want them to.”

“It made me realize how unimaginative I had always been about battered wives. Disaster creeps up, a tidal wave on the tourist beach. By the time you can see it, you are powerless or unable to resist it and it rolls you up and away.”

“I wake in the night. Or sometimes I don't wake in the night. It hardly seems to make a difference.”

“I wanted to be respected and to be loved. I longed for a man, like my father, to come and take me away from it all.”

“The feeling of pleasure was like nothing I had ever felt before and I wanted his hands to feel me all over as he sat there groping me and I was left wondering was it him or the drug making me feel so good?”

“At least in a book I am away from my body for a while. But I want to do things, not just read about them. I want my life.”