“She understood at once, and with the courageous goodwill that sustained her, resigned herself to the fact: there was always a drawback. There had to be. Sometimes it was the lack of light, or a factory nearby, or not enough rooms. Here, it was a railroad.”

“She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.”

“Go and tell that nasty, rude little princess that we've known each other for long enough and gabbed enough in ladies' rooms that she should skip the ho-hum royal routine and just pop over here and ask me herself. … Tell her I'll sing if she christens a ship first.”

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening.”

“Apparently, dancing for him and throwing herself at him weren't enough. Apparently, she had to nearly commit murder to arouse him enough to attack her.”

“Courage is not herself enough. She cannot stand alone. She is a part, not a whole, a wife, not a man and wife. A well appreciated helpmeet.”

“She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.”

“They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”

“She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.”

“Sometimes, she reflected, she dressed for courage, sometimes for success, and sometimes for the consolation of knowing that whatever else went wrong, at least she liked her clothes.”