“You're proving to be a merciless ghost, Papa. I should have expected it, knowing you as I do, Joanna said. Her tears were coming faster now. "What do you mean to do, Papa? Shall you haunt me for the rest of my days?" Her voice broke; kneeling on the icy tiles before John's coffin, she wept bitterly.”

“Not everybody believes in ghosts, but I do. Do you know what they are, Trisha?

She had shaken her head slowly.

Men and women who can't get over their past… That's what ghosts are.”

“You lit into me last night. You said what I did was stupid.
- That's what my head said. But my heart… My stupid heart… Her voice broke. It was singing.”

“You may have married her, but she is mine. Do you think I shall let you take her? She may be ten times your wife, but, by God, you shall never have her.”

“And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot.”

“I love Nicole. Nicole and I happen to be very great friends. Besides that, the press never get it straight. They do not print what you say… We were in Venice for Birth at the Venice Film Festival. And you know when you have a day when you go from one room to another with the roundtables with about five journalists sitting around at each table throwing questions at you all the time. So in one of these rooms, I'm sitting there. And one of the journalists said, you're an icon and Nicole Kidman's an icon and what do you think about that? And I said, why do you have to burden her with the category? She's a young woman. She's got her whole career ahead of her. Why does she have to be pegged as an icon or as anything? Let her enjoy her time. Don't, you know, suddenly put her in a slot. And that was all I said. The word "legend" never came up. It was "icon."”

““Mama’s beautiful?” I asked. “Are you blind?” said my brother. “Don’t you see how men and women are always looking at our mother everywhere she goes. Our mother is more beautiful than any movie star you’ll ever see, and yet this isn’t why papa chose her. He chose her, he’s told us a thousand times, because when he first saw her, she was in line to go into the dance hall over in Carlos Malo with her brother and sister. And when a fight broke out, she didn’t get excited and enjoy it like her sister and the other women. No, she and her brother moved away, wanting no part of it, and so, by seeing this, papa knew that she was a woman of high intelligence, respect, and responsibility; a person that he could trust with his life. And trust, remember, is the foundation of all love, papa says.””

“The trouble with you,” the Ugly Girl said, “is that you think you know just what everyone should do, don’t you?”
The Mad Duke smiled at her. His face was bright and sharp, smooth and glittering. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“And what,” she said, “if you’re wrong?”

“You come back and you do it right now," Morgead bellowed in her ears and in her mind. "Right now! Do you hear me?”

“I can't do this to you,' he said, drawing back. Emily put her hand on his and pulled the gun to her temple. 'Then do it for me,' she said.”