"'unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.'" p. 10

"I'm here, in this stupid little flat, on my own, and I'm thirty-five years old, and I own a tiny failing business, and my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost. And if I went back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in an old people's home, I wouldn't worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e., the rest of it, would be over. And I wouldn't even have had to kill myself." p. 53

"'So I go to Wood Green and I come back with a mint-condition "You Left the Water Running," which I pick up for a tenner. That's not a bad morning's...