“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish…like a shadow… a mist passing across her soul's summer day.”

“It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.”

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

“And he made love to her, offering his body in both tenderness and anger, unsure which was the best way to pass her bits of his soul so that she could patch her own with it”

“In her eyes is the living Hght
Of a wanderer to earth
From a far celestial height:
Summers five are all the span —
Summers five since Time began
To veil in mists of human night
A shining angel-birth.

Does an angel look from her eyes?
Will she suddenly spring away,
And soar to her home in the skies?
Beatrice! Blessing and blessed to be!”

“She still felt his gaze on her like the brush of a finger across the back of her neck, making her shiver.”

“To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.”

“All day, the colors had been those of dusk, mist moving like a water creature across the great flanks of mountains possessed of ocean shadows and depths.”

“Wherever her feet pass, white flowers part the grass.”

“He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.”