“...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.”

“All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important in...”

“I don't cook anything fancy. Sheba's appetite isn't up to much and I've never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the o...”

“It's clear that politeness to one's elders can't always be justified on the basis of the elder's superior wisdom. It's just that it's not attractive to see a young person answering an older person ...”

“There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. Th...”

“The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never ha...”

“But some secrets are too delicious not to share.”

“She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that s...”

“A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.”

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away a...”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of makin...”