“No one else knew how she'd longed for extinction, how much part of her had hungered simply to quit. To end. She'd once intended, coldly and logically, to do just that… She'd sacrificed her naval career… and a corner of her mind suspected she'd actually wanted to sacrifice it — that she'd planned to use the loss of the vocation she loved so much as one more reason to end her dreary existence. It had seemed only reasonable then; now the memory was one more coal of contempt for her own weakness, her willingness to surrender to her own pain when she'd always refused to surrender to anyone else.”

“Perhaps his love for her made him less than impartial, but he also knew how deeply she'd been hurt and chided her for judging herself so much more harshly than she would have judged someone else…”

“She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do.
And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find
herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella.”

“Wildness had never been a part of her life. Home, work, home, work. That's all her life had consisted of, really. She'd told Maddox that she'd been glad for her solitude, bu the truth was, there were times she'd been starved for touch. Any touch.”

“She thought of something her mother had told her when she'd finally broken up with one of her most dysfunctional boyfriends.”

“She didn't know how much she'd been hoping that he still loved her, until she felt how much it hurt to realize he didn't.”

“Jace was still staring at her as if she'd told him she'd found out one of the Silent Brothers doing nude cartwheels in the hallway.”

“With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”

“She existed in her friends; there she was. All the parts of herself she'd forgotten. She knew herself best when she was with them.”

“i remembered the myth about Andromeda and how she had been chained to a rock by her own parents as a sacrifice to a sea monster. Maybe she'd gotten too many F's on her report card or something.”