Iona Iverson's Rules For Commuting Quotes

It makes me furious that as men age, they gain gravitas. They become “silver foxes.” Women, however, become invisible. We cannot allow this to happen, my friends. We must all be more Iona. We all deserve, like Iona, to have a Triumphant Second Act.

she just wanted to sit quietly and imagine herself in a world where she still mattered.

But sometimes when you put two very different people together, a kind of magic, an alchemy, occurs. Bea said I was like eggs and sugar, and she was flour and butter, and when you mixed us together, we were more than just the combination of our ingredients, we were the whole damn cake.

Your anxiety is the other side of the coin of your empathy.

If you’re going to get it wrong, Martha, make sure you get it wrong with PANACHE! Surely they’ll give you a mark for style, at least?

You know, there’s a fabulous Buddhist saying that goes: When the pupil is ready, the teacher appears . . . ,” said Iona, with a loaded emphasis on teacher.

Why had it taken her so long to see her train carriage as a fascinating portal into other people's stories, rather than just a way of getting from A to B?

The only way to be guaranteed of failure, dear boy, is not to try,” said Iona. “Love is the greatest risk of all, but a life without it is meaningless.

The magic of acting is it takes you out of yourself. It allows you to try on other people’s clothes and inhabit different worlds. It’s the perfect therapy when real life is too hard.

Your past experiences, she’d explained, are the foundations on which you build your future. Build them on pride, not shame. Denying your history leaves your house standing on sand, always in danger of collapsing.

Her latest editor had scheduled a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree appraisal, which sounded altogether too intimate. At her age (fifty-seven), one didn’t like to be appraised too closely, and certainly not from every angle.

Iona found herself at a loss as to the required etiquette. Her recent exchanges with Piers had served only as salutary reminders that engaging with strangers on the train was not a good idea at all. That’s why there was an unwritten law against it. But she and Sanjay had shared a moment. They were joined together, like it or not, by a brush with death. So, what were the rules now? God, it was difficult being British sometimes

In her experience, most endings turned out to be beginnings in disguise.

He’d tried to cajole her out of her office space with sweet talk of an extra hour in bed and more flexibility, and, when that didn’t work, had attempted to drive her out by making her do something awful called hot desking, which—she learned—was corporate speak for sharing

Katkad ti sudbina jednostavno pokaže kojim putem da ideš i nemaš drugu opciju nego poći. A ako je ovo tvoja sudbina, dogodit će se. Samo čekaj. Ni u kom slučaju nije gotovo dok nije gotovo.

Ljubav je najveći rizik od svih, no život bez nje je besmislen.

Postoje neki problemi koje zaista ne možeš riješiti. Samo moraš naći način da s njima živiš.

No woman is anyone’s ‘other half.’ We are all entire people. Completely whole, and totally unique.

Sanjay would have chosen an emerald for Emmie, to go with her eyes.

women of a certain age’ just want to be seen, heard, made to feel like we matter. We need to know that we’re not irrelevant or surplus to requirements,

THE ADVANTAGE OF BOARDING the train at Hampton Court was that it was the end of the line, or the beginning, depending, of course, on which way you were traveling. There was a life lesson there, thought Iona. In her experience, most endings turned out to be beginnings in disguise.

looked very much worse than not so good. She felt like Winnie-the-Pooh bumping into Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood. She was just a little annoyed at Piers for bringing down the mood.

looked very much worse than not so good. She felt like Winnie-the-Pooh bumping into Eeyore in the Hundred Acre Wood. She was just a little annoyed

Was the only one holding her breath as they waited for the door to open? The

Thames, the Palace, and Bushy Park.

See the group—no, the “cackle”—of hyenas

Hampton Court maze!

They’d been so broke after buying the house, and Iona couldn’t believe her luck when someone offered to pay her to go to parties and then gossip about them, which was how she spent all her time anyway.

they didn’t want to be her friends, just her protectors, and their suffocating concern only made her feel weaker and more pathetic. More of a target.

If you give up, they win, darling,” she’d said. “They want us to be small, so we have to stand tall. They want us to be invisible, so we have to be seen. They want us to be quiet, so we have to be heard. They want us to surrender, so we have to fight.

But that’s not the way today’s youth-obsessed society views me, is it? Anyone over the age of fifty is deemed irrelevant, it seems. Dinosaurs.

It was so easy—when you spent the majority of your waking hours in the harsh, artificial light and brutally sanitized interiors of a London hospital—to forget how healing the outdoors could be.

what is the point of being alive if you go through life unnoticed,

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, Iona had said, look like a victim, become a target.

Darling, she’s a dog, not a child, she’d said on numerous occasions. Iona was quite aware of that. Children these days were rather selfish, lazy, and entitled, she thought.

She’d noticed him because of his exquisite tailoring, which ordinarily she would have admired, but it was rather ruined by an extraordinary sense of entitlement that only really comes with being white, male, heterosexual, and excessively solvent. This was evidenced by his penchant for manspreading, and talking extremely loudly on his mobile phone about the markets and positions. She’d once heard him refer to his wife as the ball and chain.

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple . . .