“She means well, but she always manages to do the wrong thing. She has a real talent for it.”

“I think she must have been very strictly brought up, she's so desperately anxious to do the wrong thing correctly.”

“She knows that I've been doing something wrong,
But she won't say anything.”

“A girl, if she has any pride, is so ashamed of having anything she wishes to say out of the hearing of her own family, she thinks it must be something so very wrong, that it is ten to one, if she have the opportunity of saying it, that she will not.
And yet she is spending her life, perhaps, in dreaming of accidental means of unrestrained communion.”

“People always blame the girl; she should have said no. A monosyllable, but conventional wisdom has always been that boys can't manage it.”

“What did she do wrong?”

“She's no chicken; she's on the wrong side of thirty, if she be a day.”

“She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”

“People are always asking, does God exist? Of course she does. The real question: what is she like?”

“The fundamental mistake I had always made—and that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”