“What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.”

“She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away.”

“Katie smiled and turned away, knowing it wasn't an illusion or a figment of her imagination. She knew what she saw. She knew what she believed.”

“She liked to imagine that when she passed, the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was. Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was immaculate anonymity.”

“For the first time, she did want more. She did not know what she wanted, knew that it was dangerous and that she should rest content with what she had, but she knew an emptiness deep inside her, which began to ache.”

“Just leave her alone. You're annoying her.'
'I'm not annoying her. She doesn't even know how to be annoyed. She's, what, a week old?'
'She's three months.'
'She's three months in our years, but what is she in baby years?”

“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”

“The kids kept walking, moving through the Henley's halls like a tide, but when Kat turned to leave, she walked in the opposite directions. She wasn't an ordinary kid, after all.
Katarina Bishop followed no one.”

“When she was home from her boarding-school I used to see her almost every day sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annexe. She and her younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with M.”

“…that she was the one who'd made friends with the Snake, that she'd let it lick the blood of her first menstruation, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo eee, that she … ooo, eee, that she now knew what the Serpent knew.”