“I envy you then. I have no idea what it would be like to have people like that in my life. People who needed me."She watched him go. She could need him. Could fill up that part of him.”

“She had seemed to need something from him that he hadn’t been able to give...at last he realized that what she had needed from him was need itself. That he should need her as she needed him.”

“Aphrodite then promised Zeus that as soon as the girdle could be removed, she would reserve her flower for him. And she told him that her flower, as Nerites had advised her, was like a lovely oyster & she hoped that he liked oysters. And she told him that that was all that she had to give him in return for his seed. And she hoped that he would swallow her flower just as she swallowed his seed.”

“Even his highly emotional Italian mother didn't believe that true love could blossom overnight. Like his brothers and sisters-in-law, she wanted nothing more for him than to marry and start a family, but if he showed up at her doorstep and said that he'd met someone two days ago and knew she was the one for him, his mother would smack him with a broom, curse in Italian, and drag him to church, sure that he had some serious sins that needed confessing.”

“But now, alone in my house, I have come to realize that destiny can hurt a person as much as it can bless him, and I find myself wondering why--out of all the people in all the world I could have ever loved--I had to fall in love with someone who was taken away from me.”

“We were on Barrow Street now."Who is the man with the scar?" I said.She shot me a glance, and her face hardened. "You saw him?""How could I miss? He was the real center of attention. Didn't you go to the opening at all?""No" She said. "And just because you saw him doesn't mean he was there.”

“If you'd rather not answer, you don't have to," Miles offered. "I'm sure it wouldn't change my impression of him, anyway.""And what impression is that?""I don't like him." Sarah laughed. "Why do you say that?" "Because you don't like him.""You're pretty perceptive.”