“No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It's the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.”

“Weak people always attack strong people - it's safer. It's weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Stong people can walk away - no repercussions, you see, if you attack a stong person.”

“He didn't subscribe to the view...that spirituality was a fast track to happiness. He believed the opposite was true: spiritual people suffered more than most.”

“He wondered how many new starts a person was entitled to, how many times one could say it was the other person's fault and truly believe it.”

“She was irritated, briefly, by the thought that she might be becoming more mature. Why should she become a better person when no one else did?”

“What they'd got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase "family annihilation", especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he'd written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt's nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.”

“But we’ll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we’ll have each other”