“Charlotte is the sort of person who's inclined to feel guilty imagining so much as a kiss between her and someone who's already involved, the sort of person who can't really even manage a fantasy about a movie star who might be married, much as she finds, let's say, Andy Garcia to be worth imagnining, Charlotte is the sort of person who will have to get Andy Garcia divorced, within the fantasy but having nothing to do with having met her, he has to be divorced prior to having met her in order for her to think about kissing him, and so Charlotte tends to find it easier to just fantasize about celebrities she knows are single than to go to all that trouble. ”

“Russell made a comment to Charlotte about how she struck him as being really kind of healthy, in an emotional way, which wasn't completely surprising -- she knew she was fairly adroit at making people think she had it going on in that way (which gets into another whole thing about whether that was really a useful trait, which in fact she was pretty sure it wasn't, considering that maybe she could actually get some help from people, if she were willing to admit she needed any).”

“All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.”

“Some people spend their entire lives thinking about one particular famous person. They pick one person who's famous, and they dwell on him or her. They devote almost their entire consciousness to thinking about this person they've never even met, or maybe met once. If you ask any famous person about the kind of mail they get, you'll find that almost every one of them has at least one person who's obsessed with them and writes constantly. It feels so strange to think that someone is spending their whole time thinking about you.”

“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people - those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;”

“She walked about with the rather fated expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her.”

“She could only wait. But she was not idle while she waited, because she was holding herself in readiness for whatever it was that she would have to do. She was trying not to be frightened in her mind, and she found that that sort of waiting and thinking really keep a person quite busy.”