“It wasn’t like it had been with Claire. That was a case of two old friends losing their nerve at the same time, both on the last lap of their lives. And Howard had known, even as it was happening, that they were switching lanes out of fear, just to see if it felt different, better, easier, to run in this new lane – scared as they were of carrying on for ever in the lane they were in.”
–On Beauty by Zadie Smith, pp 335
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