“My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know. She thought she had never loved him so much as at this moment, when she heard the convent door close, hard and final, and felt the wall shutting her in.”

“Sometimes a woman's love of being loved gets the better of her conscience, and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong.”

“My hope and prayer is that everyone know and love our country for what she really is and what she stands for.”

“You had to know someone very well to make them laugh like that. She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did not know him at all?”

“At first, she could not talk. Perhaps it was the sudden bumpiness of love she felt for him. Or had she always loved him?”

“She's had so little love, Jesse thought, I will drown her in it for the rest of her life.”

“but she realized that she wanted him to know her. She wanted him to understand her, if only because she had strange sense that he was the kind of man she could fall in love with, even if she didn't want to.”

“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.”

“Somehow she had thought of him so much that when she actually saw him again her affection seemed cooler. Had she worn out the passion by dint of constancy?”

“The truth is that I wasn't there with her when she needed me. Now she see's how I love Nanhoï and she believes that I can't love her as much as I love my son. That I've never loved her like this. I try to tell her that she's distorting everything in her pain and not seeing the truth. That I've painfully missed her since our separation and that I've never stopped loving her. But even though she gradually calms down, I have a feeling she doesn't believe me.”