“Fair means everyone gets what they need. And the only way to get what you need is to make it happen yourself.”

“Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same. Fairness means everyone gets what they need.”

“I tried to think of something to say. Excuse me? Hello? Marry me? Anything would have done.”

“Right," Sadie said. "And Set will just stand there calmly while I read him to death.”

“Unless you stop him. Perhaps next we meet.""You'll be just as annoying?" I guessed.He fixed my with those warm brown eyes. "Or perhaps you could bring me up to speed on those modern courtship ritua...”

“You know how hard it is to feel like an extreme falcon-headed combat machine when somebody calls you "chicken man"?”

“Say youll marry me when I come back or, before God, I wont go. Ill stay around here and play a guitar under your window every night and sing at the top of my voice and compromise you, so youll have...”

“He hated being filled with terror. It was embarrassing.”

“The weekend break had begun with the usual resentment and had continued with half-repressed ill humour. It was, of course, his fault. He had been more ready to hurt his wife's feelings and deprive ...”

“work at our responsibility as parents as if everything in life counted on it, because in fact everything in life does count on it.”

“Happiness [is] only real when shared”

“That's what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you're not so lovable.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Id never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”