“Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.”

Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.

You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.

She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know yo shouldn’t be laughing.

If you’d bothered to ask me, Clark, if you’d bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours.

The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy.

I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.

You decided what you thought you’d like me to do, and you went ahead and did it. You did what everyone else does. You decided for me.

Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere.

I told him I loved him,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And he just said it wasn’t enough.” Her eyes were wide and bleak . “How am I supposed to live with that?

Just live well. Just live

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me.

I learnt that I must never finish a book with nothing else to do.

You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.

Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven.

Makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.

What he does with it, that’s something else, but he’s got it all. The talent, the instrument is there, that’s why he has endured.

Quite possibly there would be no other human beings left to be concerned about anything else.

If you want to be an actor and you love acting, you can do it whether you’re doing something else or not.