“These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.”

“I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violoncello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life.”

“Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to do, Billy shuffled in their direction. He wondered what ragedy so many had found to lament out of doors.”

“At these words, the fathers of the fifty boys cried out aloud; the mothers repeated their exclamations an octave higher; whilst the rest, without knowing the cause, soon drowned the voices of both, with still louder lamentations of their own.”

“Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.”

“Whoever it was, whether I knew them or not, if I could help in some way, I would. I mean, if you can help, you have to help. Don't you think? - Poppy Wyatt”