"I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen' 'You make it sound so simple.''It is simple,' he said. 'The thing is, it's also a lot of hard work. And people don't want to put in a lot of work."

"I just want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress."

"For every book that I write... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life."

"And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice."

"A face whose emotions had not yet been battered by experience."

"Don't you think it's actually harder for you . . . to adapt, I mean? Because you've done all that stuff?''Are you asking me if I wish I'd never done it?''I'm just wondering if it would have been easier for you. If you'd led a smaller life. To live like this, I mean.''I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, if you're stuck in one of these, all you have are the places n your memory that you can go to.' He smiled. It was tight, as if it cost him. 'So if you're asking me would I rather be reminiscing about the view of the caste from the minimart, or that lovely row of shops down off the roundabout, then, no. My life was just fine, thanks."

"All Chelsea's internet dates were gorgeous. Until she met them."

"There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, when time stalls and slips, when life -real life- seems to exist at one remove."

"Live boldly. Push yourself. Don't settle."

"Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength."

"Le Marais?''It's a little district in the centre of Paris. It is full of cobbled streets and teetering apartment blocks and gay men and orthodox Jews and women of a certain age who once looked like Brigitte Bardot. It's the only place to stay."

"Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith."

"But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside.I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn't even begin to understand."

"It is the death of hope that comes as the greatest relief."

"So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark."

"The hardest thing about talking to teenagers, I had discovered, was that whatever you said inevitably came across like something an elderly aunt would say at a wedding."

"She is probably slightly too old to pout, but they've been going out a short enough time for it still to be cute."

"I could barely even say Will's name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a carer for someone for six months. I'd loved him, and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it?"

"Moving on means we have to protect ourselves."

"Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill."

"You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible."

"I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow, or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand."

"You live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think of the bruises."