Pieter would be pleased with the rest of the coins, the debt now settled. I would not have cost him anything. A maid came free.

People had gone west leaving behind all sorts of trouble; what they found in California was the space and freedom to create new trouble.

Yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach.

Stay here and do the packing and let the young one run all over California for you! Don’t you always say the success of collecting is in the packing? You’re the boss – take the most important role and stop moaning!

Our lives are becoming more convenient but less tangible, and bookshops are the victims of that choice.

Don’t write about what you know – write about what you’re interested in. Don’t write about yourself – you aren’t as interesting as you think.

Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn’t actually done much about it until I came to London.

I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.

I feel like a bird who has been wounded with an arrow and now cannot fly.

Yes, my boy; yes, my girl. The tension between contraries is what makes us ourselves. We have not just one, but the other too, mixing and clashing and sparking inside us. Not just light, but dark. Not just peace, but at war. Not just innocent, but experienced.