“Looking at him now-even if she hadn't been in love with him, that part of her that was her mother's daugher, that loved every beautiful thing for its beauty alone, would still have wanted him.”

“"But tell me how it is that she could be so beautiful without any heart at all — without any place even for a heart to live in." "I cannot quite tell," she said; "but I am sure she would not look so beautiful if she did not take means to make herself look more beautiful than she is. And then, you know, you began by being in love with her before you saw her beauty … But the chief thing that makes her beautiful is this: that, although she loves no man, she loves the love of any man; and when she finds one in her power, her desire to bewitch him and gain his love (not for the sake of his love either, but that she may be conscious anew of her own beauty, through the admiration he manifests), makes her very lovely—with a self-destructive beauty…"”

“‎When she looked up at him, it was suddenly easy for her to imagine that her fears were pointless. That he would love her no matter what she told him, and that he was the kind of man who loved her already and would love her forever.”

“-"He loved her… It was noble of him. It was beautiful."

-"It was stupid.”

“Still, it would have been great, just once, to have a man stare at her with total adoration. To have him be… enthralled. Yes, that was the word. She would have loved for a man to be enthralled by her.”

“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”

“Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.”

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

“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.”

“I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about that girl and if he loved her and still misses her.”