“I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This is happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.”

“That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach - I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.”

“The thought of all that happiness was hard to bear. What's the point of happiness when all it does is throw the facts of dying into clear relief?”

“We all operate on different levels of awareness. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing.”

“To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to...Well, to be honest, I'm still some way from that.”

“I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.”

“But I can hardly remember what it felt like. It's like everything that happens to you. It doesn't feel real.”