“It hasn't taken long to find herself thinking that people are watching. And that they always have been, all the time. It was only a few months ago that Kate had finally been able to imagine she was living a totally surveillance-free life.”

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”

“She had fooled herself into believing she was living the life she’d always dreamed of living when all she had been doing was hiding from it.”

“She had worked a year to get him out of her life as much as she possibly could. He always had a place in her heart since she had loved him so obsessively for such a long time, but she had been able to extract herself from him to an extent.”

“She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.”

“She was pulling a rope out of the water and knew it was coming to the end when the barnacles started to appear and they became more think and clustered. Then it was strangely peaceful and the sound was turned off. She stood at the bow of a ship. If only she could have stood this way above the water and really breathed and let the waves go by like pages being turned and watched everything more closely and chosen things more carefully then she might have been able to read the spirit within herself and would not have spent her life as if she were only halfway in it.For a moment she felt an astonishing brilliance and heat and light and all of herself flared up and the vibration after sixty-five years was not weakened by time but more dense then suddenly it was as if the flame had caught the flimsiest piece of paper for it flickered up and flew into the air then quickly sank down withered into a thin cinder of ash which blew off, inconsequential. Her life had not been long enough for her to know the whole of herself, it had not been long enough or wide.”