“She felt a cage coming down around her; too late she realized that he had her trapped by the heart. And like any unwilling animal that was well and truly caught, she could escape only by leaving a piece of herself behind.”

“She was so quiet. So reflective. And she could erase herself, her spirit, with a swiftness that truly startled, when she knew the people around her could not respect it.”

“She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.”

“Tatiana realized she was too young to hide well what was in her heart but
old enough to know that her heart was in her eyes.”

“but she realized that she wanted him to know her. She wanted him to understand her, if only because she had strange sense that he was the kind of man she could fall in love with, even if she didn't want to.”

“And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance”

“And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.”

“The candlelight dances off her mahogany-coloured skin as she un-robes, and she is smiling from the very middle of herself, and you look at them and you think "This is the one, this is it" and then—and then the cage comes down!”

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”

“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”