“She took pictures because it was the only way she knew she existed. I was here. It was about anchoring herself in a moment when everything else seemed to be floating off in the distance.”

“Really?" Olivia managed. It's called conversation, she reminded herself, like a visitor from a foreign planet. Answer one question, ask another. "Where do you live?”

“I never said I didn’t identify with Lily,” she went on, her voice clear and her own. “I think in some way she’s the heart of the book. And her transformation at the end, when she’s finally able to finish her painting, after she doesn’t have anything holding her back…it’s one of the most important scenes in the novel. It’s when she finally realises who she is.”Mr Whitley nodded vaguely, pacing the length of a square-paned window overlooking the courtyard below.“And what was it?” he asked deliberately. “What do you think was holding her back all that time?”Olivia looked down at her feet, feeling every pair of eyes in the class burning holes into the top of her head. Miles’s mushroom loafers were fidgeting under the chair beside her, and she felt him holding his breathe. Her heart was pounding, but this time it was different. Everybody in the room was waiting for her, and that was okay. This time she had things to say.“The past,” Olivia answered finally. “The past was holding her back.”

“Whatever you wish for wish carefully, and make sure it comes from your heart. Those are the only wishes that count.”

“Family's not family unless it's totally messing you up. I'm pretty sure that's the point”

“She found herself missing him - this person who didn't even exist.”

“But if you knew that, why on earth did you marry her?" Rosemary asked. "Why?" Rhett's mouth twisted in a smile."Because she was so full of fire and so recklessly, stubbornly brave.Because she was such a child beneath all her pretenses.Because she was unlike any woman I had ever known. She fascinatedme,infuriated me, drove me mad. I loved her as consumingly as she loved him. From the day I first laid eyes on her. It was a kind of disease." There was a weight of sorrow in his voice. He bowed his head into his two hands and laughed shakily. His voice was muffled and blurred by his fingers. "What a grotesque practical joke life is. Now Ashley Wilkes is a free man and would marry Scarlett on a moment's notice, and I want to be rid of her. Naturally that makes her determined to have me. She wants only what she cannot have."Rhett raised his head. "I'm afraid," he said quietly, "afraid that it will all begin again. I know that she's heartless and completely selfish, that she's like a child who cries for a toy and then breaks it once she has it. But there are moments when she tilts her head at a certain angle, or she smiles that gleeful smile, or she suddenly looks lost-and I come close to forgetting what I know.”