“That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.”

“I tend to be so lost in the work that I don't notice the weather. My partner will come home and say, 'Beautiful day, wasn't it?' and I'll say, 'Was it?' as I won't have noticed the real world at all.”

“Nowadays 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.”

“Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.”

“And it did me no good to recall particular conversations (if indeed these were particular conversations I was remembering so vividly, rather than inventions of my uneasy brain). Remembering clarified nothing.”

“...real loneliness is having no one to miss. Think yourself lucky you've known something worth missing.”

“It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...”

“Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.”

“And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.”

“In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.”

“A lot of the world seems to repeat itself”