“Each morning the light came through the slats of the shutters in ripples, and as it washed towards the inhabitants of the Casa Luna it smoothed away memories of the past, It was for this that they ...”

“Every profession is an island whose inhabitants earn a precarious living by taking in each others washing.”

“He had heard the voice of London that lives and breathes beneath the rumble of traffic, a voice like the continual high-pitched shriek you hear when you put your head beneath the waves of the sea. ...”

“There was a certain usefulness in having a husband whom most people could barely tolerate: it deflected envy, for one thing.”

“Novelists, said Ivo, are to the nineties what cooks were to the eighties, hairdressers to the seventies and pop-stars to the sixties Merely, you know, an expression of the Zeitgeist, Nobody actuall...”

“A hundred years ago, people had perfectly understood that you could die of a broken heart, now they thought you were making a fuss about nothingCertain kinds of suffering are like radiation: they c...”

“It had been an awful thing to lose Henry the first time, to matrimony, but to discover what a false front he was capable of was another kind of blow, and it had left her almost speechless. Then the...”

“Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.”

“She'd stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn't soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn't be on you; And no wanting what you couldn't take, beca...”

“It is so hard to leaveuntil you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”

“I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere between Mrs.W...”

“Most of us probably fall several times a day into a fit somewhat like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into a confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the...”

“We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work”

“Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty s...”

“My get-up-and-go often leaves without me.”