“Once a woman declared that she was desperately in love with him, and he took her to bed with him. "How shall I enter that item in your expense ledger?" asked his accountant later, on learning that she had got 4,000 gold pieces out of him; and Vespasian replied, "Just put it down to 'passion for Vespasian'."”

“She came from the shower wrapped in a towel and she sat on the bed and took his hand and looked down at him. I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot. He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave.”

“For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting.”

“She had loved him. He knew this; he had never doubted it. But she had also asked him to kill her. If you love someone that much, you did not lay that sort of burden on him for the rest of his life.”

“Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”

“Karna inclined his beautiful head and listened. She told him of a young woman who had been granted a boon. A secret mantra that she could use to choose a lover from among the gods. Of how, with the imprudence of youth, the woman decided to test it to see if it really worked. How she stood alone in an empty field, turned her face to the heavens and recited the mantra. The words had scarcely left her foolish lips, when Surya, the God of Day, appeared before her. The young woman, bewitched by the beauty of the shimmering young god, gave herself to him. Nine months later she bore him a son. The baby was born sheathed in light, with gold earrings in his ears and a gold breastplate on his chest, engraved with the emblem of the sun. The young mother loved her first-born son deeply, but she was unmarried and couldn't keep him. She put him in a reed basket and cast him away in a river. The child was found downriver by Adhiratha, a charioteer. And named Karna.”

“He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”

“He nodded and curled over his paper, writing quickly. As his words took form on the white page, she got to watch him… and realized she never wanted him to go. She wanted him here beside her forever.”

“Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put in him, the goodness he had put on himself as a disguise in order to get her to marry him.”

“She wasn't tracking down her father to learn more about him. She was tracking him down to learn more about herself.”