“He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.”

“Do you need someone to talk to?" she said gently. "Oh. Thank you. No, no, I'm fine." He touched his face – he'd been crying harder than he'd realized. "You sure? You don't look fine." "No, really. I've just . . . I've just had a very intense emotional experience." He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. "On here." "You're crying about music?" The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert. "Well," said Duncan. "I'm not crying about it. I'm not sure that's the right preposition." She shook her head and walked off.”

“She was the spare room that never got tidied, the e-mail that never got answered, the loan that never got repaid, the symptom that never got described to a doctor.”

“because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you're prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different -- oh, I would have done it if she hadn't been there or he hadn't been there or if someone hadn't sat on my head -- but that fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we'd all had ample opportunity not to be.”

“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.”

“In the old days, when he flew a lot, he'd never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he'd spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that's what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements, but instead he'd sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.”

“She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything. And then, after the regret had flared and burned out, she didn't care. He should know, she thought. She wanted him to know. She felt something for somebody, and she'd told him.”