Quotes from Zoë Heller

It's similar to the way you feel cuddling an infant or a kitten, when you want to squeeze it so hard you'd kill it...

It's always a disappointing business confronting my own reflection. My body isn't bad. It's a perfectly nice, serviceable body. It's just that the external me- the study, lightly wrinkled, handbagged me- does so little credit to the stuff that's inside.

I'm a child in that respect: able to live, physically speaking, on a crumb of anticipation for weeks at a time, but always in danger of crushing the waited-for event with the freight of my excessive hope.

Things that are truly innocent don't need to be labelled as such.

In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.

I mean, what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.

The number of secrets I receive is in inverse proportion to the number of secrets anyone expects me to have of my own. And this is the real source of my dismay. Being told secrets is not - never has been - a sign that I belong or that I matter. It is quite the opposite: confirmation of my irrelevance.

I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

There it was again - the perverse refusal to acknowledge my hostility. She seemed to me like some magical lake in a fairy tale: nothing could disturb the mirror-calm of her surface. My snide comments and bitter jokes disappeared soundlessly into her depths, leaving not so much as a ripple.

One pretends that manners are the formalisation of basic kindness and consideration, but a great deal of the time they're simply aesthetics dressed up as moral principles, aren't they?

It is always difficult, the transition from noisy refusal to humble acceptance.

Talking to him is rather like talking to a school play.

He had made a fairly unambiguous pass at her, as she was getting out of the cab. But event that had come to nothing. Sheba said that she had sensed something resentful about him, as if he begrudged her for having the power to attract him.

It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.

If everybody was so reverent of the institute of marriage, how did all the adultery get committed?

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness - seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middle class lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized.

what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.

We are bound by the secrets we share.

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.

When you live alone, your furnishings, your possessions, are always confronting you with the thinness of your existence.

It's clear that politeness to one's elders can't always be justified on the basis of the elder's superior wisdom. It's just that it's not attractive to see a young person answering an older person back.

Music, together with certain sorts of majestic landscape, had a well-known tendency to induce such faux-sublime moments: artificial intimations of transcendent truths, grandiose hunches about the nature of the universe. It was all nonsense. Her tears had been no different from the ones people cried at sentimental television commercials. They represented nothing but a momentary and regrettable submission to kitsch.

I don't write books for people to be friends with the characters. If you want to find friends, go to a cocktail party.