“And they had stayed like that forever, stuck in a perpetual postgraduate world where gigs and books and films mattered more to them than they did to other people of their age.” P. 7
“I’m sure that if you put any two random strangers in a room together and got them to talk about lives, all sort of patterns and themes and opposites would emerge, to the extent that it would look as though they hadn’t been chosen randomly at all.” P.70
“Duncan thought that real coffee was a bit of a fuss, what with all the waiting and the plunging, and claim to be happy with instant.” P.85
“Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.” P. 93
“Shouldn’t something have moved on by now? Did you really still have to hump all your gear by yourself, sell your records and your T-shirts at the back of the room, talk to the crazy guy with no friends who’d been to see you three times a week already?” P.101
“Mediocre loud music penned you in to yourself, made you pace up and down your own mind until you were pretty sure you could see how you mind end up going out of it.” P. 102
“Annie wondered whether there was, anywhere in the country, a DJ wondering how to break into the business. It seemed unlikely, given the number of establishments that seemed to think they needed one. On the contrary, she suspected demand was such that young people had to be co-opted into playing music in bars whether they wanted or not, like a form of national service.” P.127
‘…and sometimes he felt as though he was a proper entertainer, someone whose job was to make extravagant emotional gestures to help people feel.” P. 157
“She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn’t up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste.” P.165
“Nobody was so big a loser that he didn’t even have a story about losing.” P. 191
“…and he rolled the exotic words around his mouth as if they were talian wines.” P. 195
“Every now and again, one of Jackson’s school friends was got dragged off to a seaside town like this, either because the kid’s parents had misremembered a holiday from their youth, or because they had failed to spot the romanticism and poetic license in Bruce Springsteen’s early albums. They always came back appalled by the vulgarity, the malevolence and the drunkenness.” P. 199
