“It was somehow degrading, craving someone so... voraciously - another good calendar word - just because he was physically beautiful. I hadn't thought that was something women did, either.”

“I just hadn't realized before. Did you know, you're sort of beautiful?”

“Girls aren't beautiful, they're pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else.”

“This boy," he said, indicating the paintings with one sweep of his arms, "was romantic. He thought that it was beauty that bound everything together. And for him it was true. Life had been beautiful for him. He was very young. He knew very little of life. He saw beauty but he did not feel any true passion. How could he? He did not know. He had not really encountered the force of beauty's opposite.""Are you more cynical now, then?" she asked him."Cynical," he frowned, "No, not that. I know that there is an ugly side of life-and not just human life. I know that everything is not simply beautiful. I am not a romantic as this boy was. But I am not a cynic either. There is something enduring in all of life, Anne, something tough. Something. Something terribly weak yet incredibly powerful...”

“In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did.”

“I never trusted any man not to find someone else; to stay with me if he had another option. to not find something in me that would have him heading for the hills. that was the other reason for not thinking long-term- when someone walked out, as they invairiably did, it wasn't too big a shock. a disappointment but nothing, I hadn't been expecting.”