“The handkerchief dabbed at my forehead. 'Ouch! You'll have a fine-looking bruise tomorrow.''Then you'll be able to distinguish me from Rose.'The handkerchief paused. 'I could tell you apart from the beginning. You're quite different to each other, you know.'Perhaps he could tell, in the obvious ways. The odd one was Rose; the other odd one was Briony.”

“I was crying on the back-porch swing. You came out with a corsage of fresh forget-me-nots and roses, and a handkerchief. You told me any guy worth my time would always come to me with flowers and a handkerchief. One to make me smile, and the other to dry my tears, because a smart guy knows women need to cry as much as they need to laugh.”

“So then you do feel for me." His face looked pained. "Tell me you love me in the same way that I love you, and maybe that will provide some relief to hang on to when you're not here. Tell me that you'll be tortured because you're not with me, and that you'll spend hours trying to think of what you could have done differently. Tell me you'll see my face when you close your eyes at night and that i'll haunt you until morning. Tell me," he said, his voice louder now. His eyes flashing, hot and angry."I can't do that," I whispered.”

“...he looked so strange and absentminded; quite obviously he had just been reading a book, one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.”

“Already he was a very different hobbit from the one that had run out without a pocket-handkerchief from Bag-End long ago. He had not had a pocket-handkerchief for ages.”

“He looked down at his empty glass. "One of the other ways in which I am different from my father," he said. "I am not interested in marrying where I do not love."I spoke in a jesting voice. "And of all the women in the eight provinces, you have not been able to find one you could love?"Now he looked at me again, and his face was completely serious. "That's the problem," he said. "There is one.”