“What happens style wise behind closed doors, in your home, shouldn't be incidental. Home isn't just where you stow your things or sack out for the night. It should be your private escape.”

“Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak”

“Home," he repeated. "Home is where the heart is. Why don't you leave yours here? I'll take very good care of it.”

“No one can break your heart, if no one knows you have one”

“But about the drip drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the laundrette. Or to sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters. Or to have the librarian smile pityingly and say, ‘Goodness, you're a quick reader!’ when you bring back seven books, read from cover to cover, a week after taking them out. They don't know what it is to be so chronically untouched that the accidental brush of a bus conductor's hand on your shoulder sends a jolt of longing straight to your groin.”

“Don’t you love my idealism? My hypocrisy? My willingness to sound as loving and naive as possible? At least I know that I don’t know anything at all. I can admit it. Can you? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and admit that you are no different from every other bundle of bones on this planet? And maybe the only things that make you different are your hands, the way you touch things, and what happens to them.”

“When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.”