poetry: Unlooked-for

• I remember thinking it was strange that Dad's parents had died but Mum was the one crying. (8)
• The paper crackled as I unbent it, but didn't break; the rose seemed more brittle than the wrapping, and I held my breath over it, not wanting to touch it with anything at all, in case I broke it apart. The petals might have been pink, once, but they had become a dusty grey, tucked away from air and light. I refolded it in the paper and pinned it on the 'Found in a Book' noticeboard at the front of the shop, wondering who had saved it, and why; whether it had been pressed on an impulse and forgotten, or whether it was a symbol of something more significant. I find the fact that I'll never know quite comforting. It's good to be reminded that the world is full of stories that are, potentially, at least as painful as yours. (10-11)
• Poetry has a difficult enough time without people throwing it away. (13)
• His eyes were the kind of blue you find on self-help book covers, to suggest clarity and calm. (21)
• I didn't go straight back to my flat that night. I went to the river and I sat by the water and thought; Loveday, it might be okay. (23)
• God, I don't love much but I love words. (24)
• I could smell the smells of that first home: salt from the sea, and the damp earth of my mother's endless (endlessly dying, she never learned) potted plants. (25)
• Anyone who's worked in a bookshop for longer than an afternoon will tell you that people buy books for all sorts of reasons. There's the simple love of books, or course: the knowledge that here is an escape, a chance to learn, a place for your heart and mind to romp and play. Recommendations, TV shows, desire for self-improvement, the need to impress or the hope of a better self. All valid reasons, none of them guaranteeing that the book will be opened at all. I think my mother liked the covers, the word 'classics', and the possibility of other worlds. (26-27)

history: You do not yet know

crime: A brassy, jangling clang

• Although Mum and I were happy when it was the two of us, when Dad was back it was as though someone had closed a door that had been standing ajar and letting the wind come in. With Dad home we were complete, contained. (57)
• We'd laugh because we knew this place was our place; everyone else had to go back inland, away from the sea, while we got to live within the sound of its crashing and watery burr all the time. Mum would look over the water as though it might disappear if she didn't keep an eye on it. I didn't understand that, then. It's almost tempting to look back and see her storing up those seascapes for the days that were coming. Almost. (60)
• I supposed he would have told me... if I'd asked, but when you're a child you don't always know the right questions, and you don't know that you don't have forever to ask them. (65)
• So I knew that my dad's bruise and black eye would really hurt, and dads are not (were not, then, in my world) for being hurt; dads were for being protective and unbreakable, for shoulder-carries that your mother said you were too old and too heavy for, for helping neighbours to carry furniture or pushing strangers' cars when they wouldn't start. (65)

poetry: There should not be silence

• I turned the pages, carefully -- they weren't brittle, but soft, almost bruisable, and they felt as though they could have come off in my fingers, like petals tugged from a daisy. I suppose it's the fact that these small memories come from the kind of tiny reminders that you simply can't predict, and so can't protect yourself from, and they catch you, paper cuts across the heart. (82)
• But other people's words are safe and easy. Speaking what you've written is something else: your own words can eviscerate you as they come out. (88)
• We were looking at each other. We weren't stopping. It was turning into gazing. I don't gaze. (90)
• But when I was seventeen and had only just discovered Russian literature I felt as though Tolstoy was speaking to my soul with: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way'. So I had it inked on my hip. The font is delicate and fine. And yes, it will go saggy with my skin one day, but I really don't care. (92)

history: slightly crooked

• 'Of course,' I said. I didn't exactly mean, 'Of course I want to go out with you again.' It was more, ' Of course what you've said doesn't make a difference to how I feel about you, because I would never judge someone on the grounds of their mental health.' I can see how he took it to be more of a commitment than it was. (108)

crime: Time is meaningless here

• Sometimes I looked at the wedding photo that hung on the wall in the living room... Once, when I was little, I asked Mum what they were laughing about. She said they were bursting with how happy they were, and the smiles were the explosions where the happiness couldn't stay inside any longer. (115)
• I wasn't there when my mother fell down the stairs and sprained her wrist. Yes, it does look a bit suspicious in retrospect, but if you're nine I think it's reasonable to assume that your parents are telling the truth. (120)
• And I do believe that, despite everything that happened afterwards, my parents were good people, and they had loved each other, and they did love me, and they wanted to protect me from the worst of themselves. So although it seems that they didn't have the self-control to stop hurting each other, they did their damnedest not to hurt me, and however badly that turned out, I like that they tried. (120-21)

poetry: Turn pages

• I looked back to the book, my mother's writing on the postcard. I felt as though my whole body was filled with tar. Just the thought of moving made me want to cry, and I don't really cry anymore. (141)
• Books are mostly about the falling in love and the longing, the first kisses and the first nights spent together. So I hadn't really thought about how there might be a sweeter spot, one where knowing someone, being familiar with them, meant that everything was, actually, better than it was in the beginning. (142)
• I didn't want to let him know that the idea of looking into the distance was something that I would never dare to do. (146)
• But when I flipped it over I knew that I was wrong and there was only one person who would have written that message on that postcard. The words, the letters, the ink, the heart were irrefutable forensic evidence and I knew it. (149)

history: Here is food

crime: No book is without worth

poetry: no one has the key

poetry: Found

crime: refracted

poetry: Not magic

travel: Memory stirred through

poetry: Salt and violets

• I was crying less but the pain was exactly the same. I thought about Nathan all the damn time. When I pulled an old, out-or-print book about close-up magic out of a box, I put it to one side for him, and I realised that what was keeping me going was not acceptance, but hope. I didn't know whether that was good or bad. (270)
• So I hid my mother's handwriting on the noticeboard, where I could look at it if I wanted to, but where it couldn't find its way into my hand in the middle of a wakeful night. (271)
• It turned out that deleting his number was pointless, as my fingertips still knew it. (274)
• I wish I was still buying two coffees in the cafe next to the place where you work. (279)
• My heart was steady but my legs had forgotten their job as I got up. (279)
• I felt the way you feel when you go out for a walk when it's just been raining: as though everything is different, better, even unremarkable pavements and buildings you walk past every day. (283)
• If I was Cinderella, then I'd stayed out after midnight and my carriage was still a carriage after all. Except in my story it never really stopped being a pumpkin. (286-87)

poetry: Oh, the people

• I was furious with him, yet at the same time, I couldn't help being sad for him, too. One moment. One match. The end of life as you know it. (298)
• I should have been angry -- I was angry, but I was also tired, so tired of it all. My past, my mother, the ache and pull of missing her, like stitches that never heal. (309)
• I didn't yet think what I would do about my mother, yet. But I knew that I would do something, and for the first time in a long time I felt warmth when i thought about her. I'll never stop loving you, LJ, she'd written, in one of the last letters I read. I'd torn it up. But I'd never stopped loving her either. And there was a new letter, now, when I was ready. (315)
• I just started to cry and even though the salt hurt on the outside and the effort hurt on the inside, the physical pain was nothing compared to the way that my feelings were ripping at me, and it was a long, long time until the tears stopped. (318)

memoir: Choose

• I didn't want our first contact to be a shock. I think I owe it to you to be gentle. (321-22)
• I just looked at you: your face was serious, the way it used to be when you were colouring in or reading. learning lines or measuring out the ingredients for the parkin -- but it was beautiful. Those eyes of yours, as bright as stars, The way you moved, the way you shook your hair back -- everything was a memory, and I was pinned down by the shock and the pleasure of seeing you. ... I tried to call your name but my mouth wouldn't work. A man at a bus stop offered me a tissue. Things like that -- unexpected contact -- scare me a bit, these days. (323)
• You can read books about domestic violence until they come out of your ears but unless you've been there you never understand that you might love someone who hurts you, because you know that it's the best part of them that loves you and the worst part of them that hurts you and they really, really want to be the best them. ... Thinking about your father was a rumble, like the sea when we lived so close to it, but thinking about you was like starting each day to find I'd woken up outside, in a hailstorm. It shocked me, it made me panic, and it hurt. (325)
• I was too tired to fight the idea in the way that I wanted to. Why, I wanted to scream, why should I wait any longer? I didn't ever mean to hurt my daughter. No, said the counsellor, but is not meaning to hurt the same as not hurting? (327)
• You are the treasure of my life, Loveday, the best thing I ever did, and knowing that I'd destroyed all of the things I'd worked so hard to give you -- the confidence, the security, the sense of being loved -- is what broke me every single day that we've been apart. (327)

poetry: Heal your heart

• Once I sat down I broke my heart with crying, again, the way I had every day since Archie died. I could feel Annabel and Nathan looking at each other over the top of my head. Then Nathan's arm came around my shoulder and Annabel handed me a tissue, and I slowed my breathing down, and imagined the sound of Archie shouting 'Love-DEEEE'. (333)
• He really had thought of everything, except the fact that every inch and atom of his home exuded him, and I had no idea how I was going to get past that. (337)
• The thought of her was as warm as ginger parkin, as sweet as finding a perfect shell on the shore. (339)