“Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.”

“Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up.”

“What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality. Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again.”

“My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, 'University Challenge,' so you can see what kind of sad person I am.”

“In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.”

“Texting is a fundamentally sneaky form of communication, which we should despise, but it is such a boon we don't care. We are all sneaks now.”

“Texting is a supremely secretive medium of communication - it's like passing a note - and this means we should be very careful what we use it for.”

“No valentines from the cats again.”

“I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course.”

“We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.”

“We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”