me. When did I learn the more you wanted from people, the less they gave? Early on.

It wasn’t decent in life to receive other people’s difficulties like an insult or a weapon, I knew better than that, but I thought I was going to be sick.

There are no lies that wound as deeply as the lies we tell ourselves.

You won’t risk yourself, and because of that you live in a state of permanent risk.

Perhaps it was the fact that it was almost impossible to say no to someone with that kind of full visual charge because you couldn’t help feeling they were the ones who should be saying no to you.

The pain of cohabiting with someone who despised you, who thought you quite a few rungs lower than human. Bracing, that. A particular species of domestic violence.

panacea!

‘Sometimes in life,’ she said, ‘a really quite good book is what you need more than an excellent one.’

My mother had told me her mother told her that Victorian housemaids sometimes woke at seven to find they had already been cleaning out grates and laying fires since ten to five. Perhaps I was like that. I avoided people.