“ I don't cook anything fancy. Sheba's appetite isn't up to much and I've never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven… Zoë Heller
“ All my life I have been the sort of person in whom people confide. And all my life I have been flattered by this role - grateful for the frisson of importance that comes with receiving important infor… Zoë Heller
“ But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune. Zoë Heller
“ It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it... Zoë Heller
“ It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery. Zoë Heller
“ The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has b… Zoë Heller
“ Depression, in Karla's experience, was a dull, inert thing - a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for t… Zoë Heller
“ In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy. Zoë Heller
“ Sheba has often told me that she thinks there's a rhythm to married life, an ebb and flow in the pleasure that a couple take in one another. The rhythm varies from couple to couple, she says. For some… Zoë Heller
“ She was not so swept away that she could not see the high comedy of this spiritual seduction: a Litvinoff daughter, a third-generation atheist, an enemy of all forms of magical thinking, wandering int… Zoë Heller
“ I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left. Zoë Heller
“ I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery. Zoë Heller
“ Being alone is the most awful thing in the world. You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies… Zoë Heller
“ Up to this moment in her life, Audrey had never evinced the slightest sentimentality about children. Insofar as she had recognized them as an independent category of personhood, she had tended to thin… Zoë Heller
“ How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arriv… Zoë Heller
“ People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achin… Zoë Heller
“ [...]One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they're simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren't they? Zoë Heller
