Status Updates From The London Train

It was the rhythm of this love - love, she named it to herself in the mirror, not to him - that every hour she and Paul spent together existed in a perpetual present, which when they parted would recede in an instant without warning, becoming the irrecoverable past, sealed in itself, not to recur.

You're the one. You're a rarity. You're the rare, exceptional reader that the book was looking for. It found you, across the years.

No one reads Henry James these days, he said. - Do they? Not after they've been made to at university.
The shelves in the bookshops are full of them, people buy them because of the titles and the nice pictures on the covers, they think it's going to be fun like a costume drama on telly, but they don't actually read them, not to the bitter end, surely they don't?

Love is a kind of comfortable pretence, she thought, muffling everyone's separation from one another, which is absolute.

…Pia's originating as a tiny folded form invisible inside her mother, and now inside her unfolded realised self, starting the same thing over; forms folded within forms.
How different it was to be male, to feel the unfolding come to an end in your biological self, which could not be divided. The role of the male in this endless sequence was an act of faith, however definite the science.

When he was a boy she used to hold his face between her hands, and he had read in her look the promise of himself, surprising and elating her, the giftedness she could not account for.