Quotes from Marian Keyes

Nkechi never tried to hide her bottom. She was proud of it. Fascinating to me. Irish girls' lives were a constant quest for bottom-disguising or bottom-reducing clothing tactics. We can learn much from other cultures.

The stars are always there, even in the daytime. Sometimes we just can't see them.

Insomnia is an enemy that attacks in many forms. Sometimes it shows up the moment I get into bed and lingers for a couple of hours. Other nights, it stays away until about 5 a.m. and then butts in and hangs around until twenty minutes before the alarm is due to go off. It's a full-time job, battling the fecker.

Survival was an unpleasent thing to witness.

Didn't go in, just hovered outside like homeless person because (a) place was too small and Detta would have spotted me, and (b) once you're through doors of shop like that, if you try to leave without buying anything, they shoot you in the back with sniper's rifle.

But that's the point, Amy. It's easy to love someone when they're on their best behaviour — you can do that in your sleep. The real test is when they're — to use Neeve's expression — a pain in the hole. That's what love actually means.

Human touch is as important as water and food and air and laughter and new shoes.

Oh, the dread. The horrible, awful, dreadful, dready dread.

If it is made with love, the imperfect becomes perfect.

No one knows how strong they are until they have to be.

I'm seized by sudden horrible fear – the thought of living without carbs is terrifying.

But being a survivor is hard bloody work, harder than it looks, and I think I might be running low on survivor juice. Given the choice, I'd far rather a pampered life of indulgence where nothing bad ever happens.

Drink never drown anyone's sorrows, he went on. It only teaches them how to swim.

I know forty-one is the new eighteen, but tell that to my metabolism.

I remember reading somewhere that the chemicals produced in the brain by a lengthy Twitter session are similar to those produced by cocaine.

Our health is our wealth.

I don't want to be dead. I'm curious about how things will turn out. This is good, right?

I wake with a thought: This is my life. I've only got one. I should live it the way I want

Katie's mum, Penny, said I don't know why you're wasting your time with him. If he's forty-two and never been married, he's hardly likely to get married now. And Katie's sister Naomi had the darkest prediction. He'll make mincemeat of you. He won't, Katie protested. I'm not going to fall for him. So why are you bothering at all? Just killing time until I die.

A large battalion of my thoughts was marching determinedly on its way to Annoyance but it was distracted and took a wrong turn at Adam and found, to its surprise, that it had ended up in the entirely different destination of Dreamy Contentment.

I knew then that life was no respecter of circumstance. The force that flings disasters at us doesn't say Well, I won't give her that lump in her breast for another year. Best to let her recover from the death of her mother first. It just goes right on ahead and does whatever it feels like, whenever it feels like it.

That was the great thing about being not-young: knowing through practical experience that feelings, even the worst of them, calm down and eventually ease. They're probably not gone forever—that was another thing I'd learnt: the notion of 'closure' is unrealistic. If I'd felt an emotion once, it stayed on file for-ev-er and could be reactivated if the conditions were right—or, more accurately, wrong.

Reality had run and got Sanity.

Like I always say, there's a time and a place for spontaneity.