"And I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It's lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you're going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It's folding down pages of books you think they'd find interesting. It's hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine. It's the texts: 'Hope today goes well', 'How did today go?', 'Thinking of you today' and 'Picked up loo roll.' I know that love happens under the splendour of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you're lying in blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport or a traffic jam. Love is a quiet, reassuring thing: something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall."

"It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart."

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place because you'll never be this way ever again.”

"When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves— slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life."

I wonder if later I will forgive myself for having denied my loved ones demonstrations of my loving them. I was too busy demonstrating myself to the universe. I was too busy turning strangers into sites of worship.