“I had to be an adult, be a father without a son, so for one last moment I needed to be a son who needed his mother.”

“Look, my son, she is so beautiful, she has fair skin and green eyes and brown hair.''She's English?' I asked cheekily, holding the cheap photo print with trepidation. Which unfortunate victim had t...”

“Her voice was erudite, interesting; the voice of someone who straddled two cultures with a surety and style that I wished my boyfriend could find. She was smart, funny, and, above all, completely c...”

“The alternatives in my life went through my mind. Unemployed, alone, despairing, watching daytime TV. That couldn't end well.Or helping people, like genuinely making a difference. Imagine waking up...”

“As the days dwindled towards the end of the week I knew only one thing: I couldn't return to our old life. Haroon had taken Honour and Al with him,”

“People don't really change, they just adapt to circumstances.”

“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.”

“Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, lik...”

“It was during those years that I discovered that loving [my father] was like sticking a blade into my own heart. It got me nowhere, except awake in the middle of the night, recalling the years when...”

“The future for me is already a thing of the past -You were my first love and you will be my last”

“He smiles at me, and I am suddenly seventeen again - the year I realize that love doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so much as something unattainable”

“A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.”