“What she needed was just one person, one wise and sympathetic grown-up who could help her.”

“She was the kind of person who took care of things by herself. She’d never ask anybody for advice or help. It wasn’t a matter of pride, I think. She just did what seemed natural to her.”

“She deserved at least one person who saw her and knew how good she was.”

“Marriage is a union between two persons — one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.”

“She was a grown up now, and she discovered that being a grown up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toys and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.”

“I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.”

“I helped deliver one of my best friend's children. I just was so amazed by my friend, because she was not just a woman, she was not just a mother. At that moment she was creation; she was life; she was God. And as I looked in her eyes, BOOM! Her pussy exploded.”

“What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.”

“Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.”

“A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.”