“He said: "If I thought more of myself?"
"You wouldn't have much difficulty in finding it," she answered. "Let's walk."
He didn't understand the first phrase, but he turned and went by her side, silent while he heard the words.  Much difficulty in finding what? in finding it? the it that could be found if he thought of himself more; that was what he had said or she had said, whichever had said that the thing was to be found, as if Adela had said it, Adela in her real self, by no means the self that went with Hugh; no, but the true, the true Adela who was apart and his; for that was the difficulty all the while, that she was truly his, and wouldn't be, but if he thought more of her truly being, and not of her being untruly away, on whatever way, for the way that went away was not the way she truly went, but if they did away with the way she went away, then Hugh could be untrue and she true, then he would know themselves, two, true and two, on the way he was going, and the peace in himself, and the scent of her in him, and the her, meant for him, in him; that was the she he knew, and he must think the more of himself.”

“He offered her the world. She said she had her own.”

“The other day, there was a man outside, beckoning to what I though was Has Wounds. … He came back with an older man … he was crying and sobbing, and — he's Has Wounds' owner! … I told him about what I had done … He said that he's been praying for her all of this time too. He'd been crying, he'd been singing — and he thought he was alone in alll this. The nights when I'd wondered … where she was, corresponded with days where he'd wondered where she'd gone. … And this man had cared for her for 16 years! … I said how I had named her, and he said that in 16 years he had never come up with a name for her, because nothing seemed to suit her, and he was amazed to reveal that that was very much her, and he's going to call her that from now on! He begged to repay me somehow … I said listen, the best thing you can do is what you have already done — love her, take care of her, be her owner! …”

“She had never thought about her name much before, but when he said it, it was as if she were hearing it for the first time - the hard T, the caress of the double S, the way it seemed to end on a breath.”

“Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.”

“Lamachus chid a captain for a fault; and when he had said he would do so no more, "Sir," said he, "in war there is no room for a second miscarriage." Said one to Iphicrates, "What are ye afraid of?" "Of all speeches," said he, "none is so dishonourable for a general as ‘I should not have thought of it.'"”

“Do you think I'm seventeen, he remembered she had said. Not very loudly, but she had said it, though she was not annoyed any more. It had sounded more as though she was sorry she was no longer seventeen.”

“They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.”

“I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.
"Yale," he said.
I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called "Plantation Owners' Tech."
"I don't get it," he said.
"I had to ask her to explain it myself," I said. "She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them."”

“Even if I thought he as perfect for her." She turned to face him. "What were we thinking?"

"We weren't," he said. "We were in love.”