Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

I think I would feel superficially sadder, but less fundamentally broken as a person, if I could just be sad about one break-up, rather than sad about my lifelong inability to sustain a meaningful relationship.

At this point I felt a weird lack of self-recognition, and I realised that I couldn't visualise my own face or body at all. It was like someone had lifted the end of an invisible pencil and just gently erased my entire appearance.

For weeks now she has had this feeling, the feeling of moving around inside a protective film, floating like mercury. The outside world touches her against her outside skin, but not the other part of herself, inside.

Whenever something good happens to me I always find myself thinking: I wonder how long it will be until this turns out badly. And I almost want the worst to happen sooner, sooner rather than later, and if possible straight away, so at least I don’t have to feel anxious about it anymore.

How strange to feel herself so completely under the control of another person, but also how ordinary.

At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness.

I don’t know. I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven’t arisen. But what if that’s not true? What if I’m the one who can’t let myself be happy?

I hated that everything I did was so ugly, but also that I lacked the courage to confront how ugly it was.

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.

Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying, even when there are more important things we should be doing.

I feel so frightened of being hurt – not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open to it.