“Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding? 'Hell, no!' I shouted into the wind...”

“Just last year, I had to read the old Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Inspired by it, I wished I had been named Draupadi. After all, she, too, had been born differently, even abnormally. She had stepped out of fire, a gift from the old gods to her father the king. There had been no Hindu gods involved in my birth, but the loose parallels gave me a delightful sense of grandeur.”

“I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...”

“ She spotted a lone dandelion,and it crossed her mind that a younger Luce would have pounced on it and then made a wish and blown. But this Luce's wishes felt too heavy for something so light.”

“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.”

“you have to understand. i wasn't just thinking of me. i was thinking of her, too.”