“You are bad and mean and I'm going to spit on your cupcakes.”

“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.”

“But Neve, you can’t start a book and leave it halfway through,’ he’d said implacably. ‘It’s almost as bad as turning down the corner of the page, instead of using a bookmark.”

“I went out with Veronique to take my mind of you, and when I'm with you I don't feel like I'm on a rebound, I feel like I've come home. It's like my world is just different combinations of black and white, but when you're around everything goes Technicolor. You're still the coolest girl I know".”

“And suddenly I got what the big deal was about kissing. How someone could suck on your bottom lip and make you come completely undone. That someone stroking the hair back from your face could make you swoon and someone sliding his hands underneath your top could make you feel wanted for the first time in your life.”

“I’m going that way too. I live in Crouch End. Do you want to share a black cab?’Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No,thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes thatNeve was sure she was emitting. ‘You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’‘You apologised, why would I still be mad at you?’‘One day we’ll laugh about this. When little Tommy asks how we met, I’ll say, “Well, son, I threw an ice cube at your mother, then slapped herarse, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.”

“... Veronique and Dylan having the mother of all arguments. I mean, it had a plot and a subplot and several walk-on parts....”