“ruin had been the original blueprint and men and women had lived here only in a necessary but intermediate stage of the execution of the grand design”

“The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing--animals as a rule, men if necessary.”

“There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.”

“Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.”

“If any of these women had been here instead of Nynaeve, the world would have ended.”

“Sara fled upstairs as if the devil himself had been after her, leaning, gasping for breath against the thick wooden door that had no lock on the inside -- symbolic of her position here and a reminder of another age when women had been OWNED like property, and used according to the dictates of the men who possessed them.”