- Tony Webster: [Voice over] When you are young you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life and create a new reality. But as that second hand insists on speeding up and time delivers us all too quickly into middle age and then old age, that's when you want something a little milder, don't you? You want your emotions to support your life as it has become. You want them to tell you that everything is going to be okay. And is there anything wrong with that?
- Tony Webster: [Voice over]
- Tony Webster: The longer life goes on the fewer are those around to tell us our life is not our life. It is just a story we've told about our lives. A story about our lives told to others, but mainly to ourselves.
- [Voice over]
- Tony Webster: How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we embellish, adjust, make sly cuts?
- [Voice over]
- Tony Webster: I, who neither won nor lost. Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival.
- Tony Webster: [Voiceover of a letter he wrote] I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it? I suppose I am nostalgic. I think of my time with Margaret; with Susie's birth and her first years; a bunch of kids in school; a girl dancing for once in her life; a secret horizontal gesture beneath a sunlit wisteria. I think of Adrian's definition of "history." I think of everything that has happened in my life, and how little I have allowed to happen - I, who neither won nor lost, who avoided being hurt, and called it a capacity for survival. I think about how our lives got entwined, and went along together for a time. And when I look back now on that time, however brief, I am moved more than I thought possible. Indeed I'm sorry that I've known nothing of your life in the years since. No doubt you could've taught this old fool a thing or two... Perhaps, in a way, you have.
- Susie Webster: Oh, this whole thing's such a load of shit! I mean, our gene pool alone is bad enough. Workaholic meets curmudgeon, meets deranged 30-something...
- Tony Webster: You're not a curmudgeon.
- Susie Webster: I was talking about you!
- Tony Webster: I know, darling.
- [First lines]
- Tony Webster: [Voice over] I'm not very interested in my school days and feel no special nostalgia for them. But I remember sixth form.
- [Last lines]
- Susie Webster: [Is calling in to her father in his shop with her new baby boy] The NCT group send their love to you.
- Tony Webster: Oh, that's nice.
- Susie Webster: We had a lovely lunch, comparing the damage done to our bodies. Vaginas and all.
- Tony Webster: Joshua, cover your ears.