“And it's not like you never do anything wrong ever, is it?' said Marcus. 'I mean...' He had to be careful here. He knew he couldn't say too much or even anything at all about the hospital stuff. 'I mean how come I got to know Will in the first place?'Because you threw a bloody great baguette at a duck's head and killed it, basically,' said Will.”

“Marcus couldn’t believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get te highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kebab shop on Hornsey Road--nothing. He's tried to read Nicky’s thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week--nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he'd ever achieved was something he hadn't really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich kill it? Kids must spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic? There must have been something wrong with it. It was probably about to die from a heart attack or something; it was just a coincidence. But if it was, nobody would believe him. If there were any witnesses, they'd only have seen the bread hit the duck right on the back of the head, and then seen it keel over. saw it die. They'd put two and two together and make five, and he'd be imprisoned for a crime he never committed. ... "What's that floating next to it?" Will asked. "Is that the bread you threw at it?" Marcus nodded unhappily. "That's not a sandwich, that's a bloody french loaf. No wonder it keeled over. That would've killed me.”

“My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.”

“The fuck?” he said. “The fuck?” said Jess. “The fuck what?” “It's an American abbreviation,” said Martin. “ «The fuck?» means «What the fuck?» In America, they’re so busy that they don’t have time to say the «what».”

“You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet”

“Someone like my mum would say, Oh, you're just a kid, you don't know what love is.But I didn't think of anything else apart from being with Alicia, and the only time I felt like I was where I wanted to be was when I was with her. I mean, that may as well be love, mightn't it?”

“He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?”