“Love meant something to her, she dreamt of it, thought of it, wrote of it. It was the one thing in life that had eluded her completely.”

“Our minds work alike, she thought. She had found her partner, her equal, the one to work and live and love with her. Her soulmate.”

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

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”

“No one looked at her, no one thought of her. She felt herself swallowed up in the scorn of these virtuous creatures, who had first sacrificed, then rejected her as a thing useless and unclean.”

“That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion.”

“At first she beckoned and lured one into her world; then, she blurred the passageways, confused all the images, as if to elude detection.”

“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”

“She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly.”

“He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.”