“Sleep, baby, sleepYour father tends the sheepYour mother shakes the dreamland treeAnd from it fall sweet dreams of theeSleep, baby, sleep.”

“Mum said no one has ever called me by my first name so I've always assumed that even as a baby they could tell I wasn't an Arabella, a name with loops and flourishes in black-inked calligraphy; a name that contains within it girls called Bella or Bells or Belle - so many beautiful possibilities. No, from the start I was clearly a Beatrice, sensible and unembellished in Times New Roman, with no one hiding inside.”

“When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels...”

“Motherhood isn't soft and cozy and sweet; it's selfish ferocity, red in tooth and claw.”

“Can you get a summer snow-globe instead of a winter one with green grass and flowering azalea bushes and blue sky? Because I'm here, inside it. If you shake it, perhaps it fills with black smoke, not swirling snowflakes.”

“But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person. ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.”

“I'm a sliver-thin light, diamond sharp, that can slip through gaps in the world we know. I will come into your dreams and speak soft words when you think of me. There is no happy ever after - but there is an afterwards.This isn't our ending.”