“Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things – enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which.”

“Try to remember the moment when all the stupid innocent things you thought about life and love, all the things you thought mattered, all the things you though were true… try to remember when they all turned out to be lies. —Kyle”

“None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.”

“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

“Women are always underestimated by men,” said Alisaard, a note of satisfaction in her voice, “and this enables them sometimes to gather far more power to themselves than the men suspect.”

“Women were different, no doubt about it. Men broke so much more quickly. Grief didn't break women. Instead it wore them down, it hollowed them out very slowly.”

“And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them…”

“The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.”

“And if there were two things he believed were limitless, it was love and imagination.”

“There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.”