“Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.”

“She had had no idea what it would do to her seeing him in a suit.”

“What did it matter anyway that she was so much lovelier than the other girls when Henry was so blind.”

“How she wished she had Elizabeth to herself for a little so they could discuss what Henry's real intentions were and also how high and mighty Penelope had acted at lunch and what a tremendous insult it was that she'd come at all and did anyone really think she was beautiful with those oversize features anyway.”

“But in that moment she realized how false most smiles were and what a tremendous waste of time.”

“I tell you Schoonmaker she doesn't know what she has. That's the heart of it. She's like some wild creature who hasn't a clue the worth of its coat.”

“It is often advantageous to forget. Forget your wincing humiliations, forget life's blows, and get on. For blocks in every direction, down every street in the city, people not yet old enough to have lines on their foreheads were laughing away memory, warmly ensconced in shrines of forgetfulness. Those who followed the word of God and those who preferred what the priests called "hoodoo" alike. People everywhere forgetting with drink or forgetting with religion or forgetting with the numbing quality of their many heaps of things. They looked forward and imagined rosy tomorrows, and gave up whatever horrors heckled their dreams, and listened to the pretty stories of whomever ruled their pulpit.”