“And Finally I put down the last and the best advice I knew, on growing older. 'Stand up straight and try not to get fat.”

“Well I am still not drunk" I straightened up against the pillows as best I could. "You told me once that if you could still stand up, you weren't drunk." You aren't standing up." he point out. You are.”

“For a long time," he said at last, "when I was small, I pretended to myself that I was the bastard of some great man. All orphans do this, I think," he added dispassionately."It makes life easier to bear, to pretend that it will not always be as it is, that someone will come and restore you to your rightful place in the world." He shrugged."Then I grew older, and knew that this was not true. No one would come to rescue me. But then-" he turned his head and gave Jamie a smile of surpassing sweetness. "Then I grew older still, and discovered that after all, it was true. I am the son of a great man." The hook touched Jamie's hand, hard and capable. "I wish for nothing more.”

“I tell you what. Pick it up, open it anywhere, and read three pages. If you can put it down again, I’ll pay you a dollar.”

“I want to hold you hard to me and kiss you, and never let you go. I want to take you to my bed and use you like a whore, 'til I forget that I exist. And I want to put my head in your lap and weep like a child." The mouth turned up at one corner, and a blue eye opened slitwise. "Unfortunately," he said, "I can't do any but the last of those without fainting or being sick again.”

“A child was a temptation of the flesh, as well as of the spirit; I knew the bliss of that unbounded oneness, as I knew the bittersweet joy of seeing that oneness fade as the child learned itself and stood alone.But I had crossed some subtle line. Whether it was that I was born myself with some secret quota embodied in my flesh, or only that I knew my sole allegiance must be given elsewhere now...I knew. As a mother, I had the lightness now of effort completed, honor satisfied. Mission accomplished.”

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. The line from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland drifted through my mind, and I smiled. Good advice, I supposed – but only if you happened to know where the beginning was, and I didn’t quite.”