“Was there a better sound in the world than a champagne cork popping? Hell, no.”

“What the hell was an acquisitions consultant? An arms dealer? A white slave trader?”

“The Ad♥rkable Manifesto 1. We have nothing to declare but our dorkiness.2. Jumble sales are our shopping malls.3. Better to make cookies than be a cookie-cutter.4. Suffering doesn’t necessarily improve you but it does give you something to blog about.5. Experiment with Photoshop, hair dye, nail polish and cupcake flavours but never drugs.6. Don’t follow leaders, be one.7. Necessity is the mother of customisation.8. Puppies make everything better.9. Quiet girls rarely make history.10. Never shield your oddness, but wear your oddness like a shield.”

“And as the recession continues and our prospects look bleaker and bleaker, I’m excited. I look to the past to see what our future will be like. And in times of economic hardship and harsh governments, of pointless wars and mass unemployment, there was pop art and there was punk, there was hip hop and grafitti, there was acid house and riot grrrl. There was art and music and books that could bring you to your knees with their utter perfection. Because, when everything else is gone, all we’re left with is our imaginations.”

“My whole life had split in two: Smith and not Smith. I liked the Smith parts of it so much better.”

“Excuse me?’ she spat, and as Dougie and Celia always pointed out, it didn’t matter that Neve never swore because she could make ‘Excuse me?’ sound like ‘Go fuck yourself.”

“I sat there listening to him talk and talk and I realised something really important.I thought I was in love with him for all those years but it turned out I was in love with the idea of William. The actual reality was a bit of an anti-climax.I thought, well, William would never shove the word WAG into pop songs to make me laugh and he wouldn’t bite the chocolate off chocolate-covered strawberries for me and he’d never, ever watch a film with Sandra Bullock in it, unless it was a Shakespeare adaptation and then he’d spend the entire film listing all the historical inaccuracies and he’d never go down on me for half an hour because he’d lost a game of Scrabble. Point of fact, I can’t imagine William doing anything that would mess up his hair, and he’s started popping the collars of his shirts and have I mentioned that he’s not you? He’s not you, Max, and that’s why I’m actually really pleased that he’s engaged and he’s moving to Warwickshire so I don’t have a constant reminder of what an idiot I’ve been.”