“[…] Shimamoto had her own little world within her. A world that was for her alone, one I could not enter.”

“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”

“He offered her the world. She said she had her own.”

“No woman in the world, certainly none in America, has had to battle for her virtue, for her self-respect, for her right to her own children, as has the black mother.”

“Her beauty belonged to all the world but her flaws belonged to him alone.”

“She let a teasing tone enter her voice. 'Is thereemergency for which you are not prepared, Mr Swift?'
'Miss Bowman, if I had enough pockets I could save the world.”

“Whether she won or lost, she would continue to wrestle with life. It would not be with her own life alone but with all of life. Something had finally been released within her. And there it was, the sea.”

“We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”

“She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's head.”

“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”