“Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.”

“He loved her for being so beautiful, and he hated her for it. He loved how she put shiny stuff on her lips for him, and he also reviled her for it. He wanted her to walk home alone, and he wanted to run after her and grab her up before she could take another step.”

“She realized all at once the deeper thing that bothered her, the thing that made him not just irritating but intolerable: how he kept loving her blindly when she deserved it so little.”

“Why couldn't it belong to him anymore? Why couldn't he belong to it? Because he gave it up. He held on to himself, and he threw the other things away.”

“She must have sensed she never really had him. That was a sadness of hers, he knew.”

“By day she studied and touched her mother’s things, and by night, she dreamed about them. The dreams gave her as fragmented a vision of Marley as the boxes in the attic did. There were a thousand dramatic episodes, but very little sense of the person linking them together”

“She wanted him to see all of her and also none of her. She wanted him to be dazzled by the bits and blinded by the whole. She wanted him to see her whole and not in pieces. She had hopes that were hard to satisfy.”