“For almost as long as she could remember Maerad had been imprisoned behind walls. She was a slave”

“The worst stage was when one could tell she was still awake and almost alert, but she knew that nothing worked. Imprisoned. She was imprisoned. In a statue like the Sphinx. Looking out from the eyes. Her own mind, at that point, was as small and bewildered as a little fly. Behind great battlements.”

“Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.”

“Studying the young woman’s long thin legs, Tessa wondered how different her life would have been if she had had legs like that. She could not help but suspect that it would have been almost entirely different.”

“It had been the most relaxed that either of them had been for as long as he could remember--certainly since their engagement. Rachel had spun and twittered for the first few days, disoriented without a wedding as the epicenter of her near future. But the pleasure of the postmortem and of being, finally, just the two of them, had aided her recovery. By the end of the first week she was almost convincing when she said brightly, 'I'm so glad it's all over and we get to get on with normal life!' She had repeated this assertion a lot since they'd arrived, but that had been the first time that she hadn't sounded crestfallen.”

“And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.”