“The only man...he never would have dreamed. She had so many admirers, most, if not all, far more suitable than him and probably less dickish.”

“He thought it exceedingly unlikely that he would ever have married any girl, however many millions she had, if he had not loved her, and this was probably true enough, for what it is worth. Love and a million dollars is obviously a more attractive proposition than love without it, especially to a young man whose only skills were sonneteering and riding, who had been brought up to the idea of wealth and who had just run through most of his inheritance.”

“She’d so believed he could—that decades marked by disdain for emotion could have been nothing more than a faint memory in his checkered past. That she could love him enough to prove to him that the world was worth his caring, his trust. That she could turn him into the man of whom she had dreamed for so long.That was perhaps the hardest truth of all—that Ralston, the man she’d pined over for a decade, had never been real. He’d never been the strong and silent Odysseus; he’d never been aloof Darcy; never Antony, powerful and passionate. He had only ever been Ralston, arrogant and flawed and altogether flesh and blood.”

“I have written less than most writers. But I have drunk far more than most drinkers.”

“Foolish woman, will holding it secret in your heart make it any less true? If you never tell, never speak of it, will it become only a dream, less than a dream, a nightmare half-remembered? Oh, if only the gods would be so good.”

“He admired her for throwing off her aristocratic shackles -- his terms, that -- and making her own way in the world.He didn't realize that the truth was so much more complex, so much less impressive. She had less thrown than been thrown.”