“she felt that there was a tide within her, moving with the power of the moon and the ocean and the goddess, who had bound them together, rising, cresting within her heart untill she thought that she must weep, or laugh, or both. she felt her world shifting, remaking itself; holding on to all she was and all she known, but creating a space within these things for this man she was holding in her arms, so that he might share it with her, bringing to it all that he was and all that he had known. And in that instant, in the eternity of that kiss, Alayna knew, with a joy that she found frightening even as it encompassed her, that her life would never again be as it had been.”

“...He had no breath, no being, but in hers, she was his voice; he did not speak to her. But trembled on her words; She was his sight, For his eye followed hers, and saw hers, Which colored all his objects-he had crease to live within himself; She was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts...”

“Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some far way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smokey, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her.”

“She had realised that they couldn't be together. She didn't want to make a romantic drama out of it, she didn't want to sigh and mope or scream hysterically to impress others with how awful it all was, even though she felt as if something fundamental, deep within her, had been taken away from her. She was simply trying to cope, to get on with her own normal life. Which, she knew, was something he could not be a part of.  ”

“There was still one response, the greatest, that she had missed. She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth... To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his... No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired... A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience.”

“He had known so much about her once -what she thought, how she felt, the reasons for her actions. And now he only knew that he loved her, and all the other knowledge seemed passing from him just as he needed it most.”