“She had fallen in love so many times that she began to suspect she was not falling in love at all, but doing something much more ordinary.”

“There is no escape if love is not there," Hannah had said. Had Hannah known when she herself had not even suspected? It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love.”

“She was with me. She did all of those things and so many more, things I would never tell anyone, and she never even loved me. Now that’s love.”

“She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did now know him at all?”

“She had said she was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of which he was part […]? The eldest, the brother she loved, had shot himself; Fern had fallen out of a window, or jumped; and Perry was committed to violence, a criminal.”

“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.”

“No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.”

“[Harriet] hated math. She hated math with every bone in her body. She spent so much time hating it that she never had time to do it.”

“She loved with so much passion as she loved with ignorance. She did not know whether it were good or evil, beneficent or dangerous, necessary or accidental, eternal or transitory, permitted or prohibited: she loved.”

“Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett.”