“The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. [ .. ] Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that. It wasn’t much in the way of a guiding philosophy, and not one you could share, least of all with this man, but it was what she believed...
Of course there’s still no boyfriend, but she doesn’t mind. Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘Get in the taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk.’ but at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic." - One Day
