You do know the answers to most of your problems. Somewhere deep inside, you know.

We needed fish, really, but I could not speak Fish.

Here come the colours of Madeleine, thought Jack, and the colours went right through his bloodstream now, sailing on tiny boats – spinnakers fixed with little toothpicks.

Where are they now? she thought. Her iPod, her iPhone, her iPad, the I-ness of her life? Her mind stretched around in its memories, searching for her things: She saw her phone on the hotel bedside table in Paris; her iPad in her Louis Vuitton urban satchel; her iPod slipping from her pocket in the restaurant, the night before she ran away.

Men speak in absolutes, women in uncertainties, and this often strikes us as a weakness in women, but it’s knowledge: a knowledge that we cannot know, not ever.

Where was she now, the girl with the thunderstorm heart?

As if Riley and Amelia were lions, and we were a menage a trois of lively, prancing deer.

If you’re bored tonight why don’t you write down everything that comes to mind when you hear the word toothpaste?

Madeleine Tully turned fourteen yesterday, but today she did not turn anything. Oh, wait. She turned a page.

Well, this might sound stupid but I think he was my best friend. Like the other half of me. I’m so scared something might have happened to him when he went back. I miss him so much sometimes I look at windows and I want to just walk right through them – like press myself through the glass. I want their sharp edges to fragment me.