The Novel Habits of Happiness

• "Cat was not stupid, but she sometimes sounded like an ill-informed seventeen-year-old." (120)
• "The ways of the human heart were Byzantine in their complexity, Isabel thought, and one should never underestimate the resentments it could harbour." (121)
• "It's a poem by Craig Raine. I love the idea of memory as an onion--layer after layer that we strip away as we remember things. And those layers of memory make us cry, just as onions do." (139)
• "She smiled, in spite of herself, in spite of the way she felt. She felt that she could cry buckets, for no particular reason, but in spite of that she smiled." (148)
• "She held him in her gaze. My entirely beautiful one, she thought. My lover. She savoured the words in her mind. My lover. (148)
• Childhood was fleeting; life was painfully brief. Art reminded us of that--in case we needed reminding. (180)
• "Everybody believed that they were the centre of the universe and at times forgot that there were other cultures." (182)
• "She was a philosopher, and she was well aware of the stern requirements of duties to self, but she was also human, and being human involved a certain amount of weakness, and silliness too; not too much of either, of course, but some. (185)
• "He was vain and he was pompous. But he was human, and his heart had been broken." (189)
• ";he's the Svengali, he's the Rasputin." (191)
• "We are fond of places because we are fond of people. (196)
• "I know I'm being unrealistic." She said that she thought he was being romantic. "That's much the same thing", he replied. (198)
• "Can't you see it, Isabel? The whole world is not your problem. We think that it is--I know that plenty of people feel they have to shoulder the burdens of the whole planet, but we can't, can we?" (248)
• "Hard choices are sometimes less hard than we think." (254)