“She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.”

“Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?”

“Now that she realized she had been waiting for him — she did not like that.”

“When she’d been with us a month or so, Lisa Cody got a diagnosis. She was a sociopath too. She was happy, because she wanted to be like Lisa in all things. Lisa was not so happy, because she had been the only sociopath among us. “We are very rare,” she told me once, “and mostly we are men.””

“When she meets a powerful man she's more likely to try and blow him away than blow him off. Stop that erection right now, you sick, sick boy. Stop it! Concentrate, that's how!”

“Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.”

“She laughed so easily when she was happy. But also when she was sad.”

“When she is happy, she can't stop talking, when she is sad she doesn't say a word.”

“When people are happy they have a reserve upon which to draw, whereas she was like a wheel without a tyre”

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”