“They were kissing. Put like that, and you could be forgiven for presuming that this was a normal kiss, all lips and skin and possibly even a little tongue. You'd miss how he smiled, how his eyes gl...”

“It is a small world. You do not have to live in it particularly long to learn that for yourself. There is a theory that, in the whole world, there are only five hundred real people (the cast, as it...”

“Let's start a new tomorrow, today.”

“Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain...”

“Everybody going to be dead one day, just give them time.”

“You know what my mum once said? said Rosie She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they mak...”

“Up the narrow stairs and into the kitchen. Rosie's mother looked around and made a face as if to indicate that it did not meet her standards of hygiene, containing as it did, edible foodstuffs. "Co...”

“Today like every day roughly 5,000 people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses.”

“Fat Charlie went back to his hotel room, the colour of underwater, where his lime sat, like a small green Buddha, on the countertop."You're no help," he told the lime. This was unfair. It was only ...”

“Little bundle of contradictions”

“Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often...”