“He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy.”

“Hattie had never been easy to love. She was too quiet, it was impossible to know what she was thinking. And she was angry all of the time and so disdainful when her high expectations weren't met.”

“He expects nothing, she thought, because he's never had anything. And nothing was expected of him. He was free in a way she never would be.”

“How easy it must be when you had no secrets from the person you lived with.”

“The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.”

“He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.”