“Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.”

“ men call it the tyranny of tears, it is an iron tyranny- no man could be so cruel, so devishlish,as a woman with her weakness, recrimination, convenient ailments, nerves and tears. We men are all weak as water before the primitive devices of Eve. I was patient at first, many years. ' ”

“All the June Saturday afternoon Sam Pollit's children were on the lookout for him as they skated round the dirt sidewalks and seamed old asphalt of R Street and Reservoir Road that bounded the deep-grassed acres of Tohoga House, their home.”

“If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.”

“Amy tossed in her bed, then froze as she heard Northcliff’s voice in her head. Do you know that when you rise in the morning, I hear your footsteps over my head? I imagine you slipping out of a worn nightgown, your body gleaming pale and sweet, and donning one of your ghastly gowns. At night, the floorboards creak as you ready yourself for bed, and I imagine you undressing. And all night long, every time you turn over in your virgin bed, I hear you. You have me imprisoned, but I am watching you.A shiver ran up her spine at the memory of Northcliff’s words, but it wasn’t fear. It was desire. She wanted to rise from her bed and go to him. She wanted to see him. Not just his face or the expanse of his chest, but all of him. Because while he said he had been imagining her, she had also been imagining him. In a motion so slow and cautious her ancient straw-stuffed mattress made no noise, Amy sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees.Northcliff was awake below. She knew it; she could feel his unswerving attention, the waves of his will beckoning her to him.”

“She looked up at him and her face was pale and austere in the uplight and her eyes lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for the glint of them and he could see her throat move in the light and he saw in her face and in her figure something he'd not seen before and the name of that thing was sorrow.”

“He feeds upon her face by day and night,And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”