She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself.

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.

Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

most of what we’d feel in any life is still available.

She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming.

They had breakfast together. They sat at their kitchen table and scrolled the day’s news and ate sourdough toast and were very much like a living endorsement for marriage.

she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences.

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’

hypochondriac