Quotes from Zoë Heller

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

It's hard to resist the magical thinking that the work habits of great writers are the key to their greatness.

But that I should have ended up in a place like this seems too custom-made a nightmare to be the work of mere ill fortune.

But I doubt very much that Sheba's comic oddity will actually earn her more lenience from the court. In all likelihood, she'll receive exactly the same punishment as a man. The guardians of gender equality won't stand for anything else. In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.

Depression, in Karla's experience, was a dull, inert thing - a toad that squatted wetly on your head until it finally gathered the energy to slither off. The unhappiness she had been living with for the last ten days was a quite different creature. It was frantic and aggressive. It had fists and fangs and hobnailed boots. It didn't sit, it assailed. It hurt her. In the mornings, it slapped her so hard in the face that she reeled as she walked to the bathroom.

If this was cynical, then we must allow that all courtship is cynical.

sense from what Sheba has told me that these dates, beneath their surface larkiness, were rather tense for her. In the classroom or on the heath with Connolly, she could believe that theirs was a beautiful, forbidden love—something sweet and fine and, if only the circumstances were tweaked, infinitely viable. Out in the world, she was forced to recognise their radical oddness as a couple.

Audrey nodded warily. She had never cared for conspiratorial female conversation of this sort. Its assumption of shared preoccupations was usually unfounded in her experience, its intimacies almost always the trapdoor to some subterranean hostility.

She was not so swept away that she could not see the high comedy of this spiritual seduction: a Litvinoff daughter, a third-generation atheist, an enemy of all forms of magical thinking, wandering into synagogue one day and finding her inner Jew. But there it was. Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience, was precisely what made it so compelling.

This is madness. You're making it into something it's not. It's all in your mind. Sheba was about to protest, and then she laughed. Isn't that the worst place it could be?

I'm a child in that respect: able to live, psychically 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.

She didn't really believe in the possibility of making good things happen with the sheer strength of your desire for them. If anything, it seemed to her, the opposite was true. The moment you wanted anything too fervently, the moment you yearned, the universe gazed with disgust upon your mewling and withheld. To get things, you had to be careless about them, the way that Rosa was.

People always seemed to think that you stopped believing things in a single, lightning-bolt moment, an instantaneous revelation of loss. For her, at least, the process of disenchantment had been achingly slow.

elegance loses its power in the presence of the properly stupid

Poor old Sheba regarded Connolly with much the same amazement and delight as you or I would a monkey who strolled out of the rain forest and asked for a gin and tonic.

Lonely people are terrible snobs about one another, I've found. They're afraid that consorting with their own kind will compound their freakishness.

Sheba's outfits tend to be very complicated – lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearing purple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved, because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted – with a lithe, rather irritating, little skip – I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. Fey was the word that swam into my mind. Fey person, I thought.

Her expression suggested the kind of deeply private, strictly incommunicable anguish of someone who has just slammed the car door on her thumb.

I live in dread of being asked to clap along to music in a public place.

Never had she been filled with so much reckless magnanimity. It was one of the discomfiting paradoxes of her adultery: sin had made her a better person.

Always mind the distance between your dreams and your reality.