“For her, choices were simple; either there was an action she could take to improve the situation, in which case she took it, or there was not, and everything else said on the subject was so much meaningless noise.”

“If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect in her situation was that now she could eat dessert without eating her vegetables.”

“In some cases, however, a person will try to avoid taking responsibility by trying to avoid making conscious choices altogether. Perhaps she cites uncontrollable passion on her part... the presence of peer pressure… or she pretends not to notice the man's actions. Whatever the case, she acts as though she is not making any choices and hence has no responsibility for the consequences.”

“because we watched her so closely out of the corners of our eyes, everything she did made too much noise, her cigarette smoke got into everything, she drank too much wine at dinner.”

“He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual women, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from the outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella. "See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her. I am inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he does for her. She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much-- as much as she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to try--which he's too simple to do.”