“Fists and rocks and clubs can do a limited amount of harm, but a gun is entirely different. It makes a weak man feel like a hero and a strong man feel as if he is immortal, and it removes the last inhibition a killer might feel. You don't have to be close to a man to put a bullet in him. You don't have to have to see his face.”

“If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask.-Emerson”

“Do I like you?No. I don't like you. I don't think about you every moment of every day. I never relive the way it felt to have your hand holding mine, to be so close to you I could smell you, feel the warmth of you, breathe the air that you breathe. I don't remember your arm around me, making me feel safe, special...WANTED.”

“I felt about him as I might feel about a friendly, dimwitted dog that had decided to move in with us. He could not be cast out into the street, but he was shedding all over the furniture.”

“You know how your eyes can deceive you at times--how a group of shapes and shadows can take on a certain form and then shift into another? It wasn't really like that; there was no physical change in him, he was exactly the same as he'd always been. I knew every line of his long body and every curl on his disheveled black head. I'd just never seen him before. you know what I'm trying to say, don't you? The change is in the heart.”

“No woman really wants a man to carry her off; she only wants him to want to do it.”

“I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle.... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)”