“She lived, we'll say,A harmless life, she called a virtuous life,A quiet life, which was not life at all(But that she had not lived enough to know)”

“There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backwards, she thinks. She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.”

“She had learned to live light because life itself could be heavy enough.”

“Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”

“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.”

“There was, too, a reality to her new life that her old life had lacked, and she realized with a shock that she had never truly loved or hated, for she had never seen the world she had been used to living in closely enough for it to evoke passion in her.”