“The great thing about being always among people of noble manners was the inevitable elevation of one's own.”

“Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.”

“I felt the reckless abandon of one who knows she stands already among the damned. "Why not, then, another sin?”

“Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder, the ambition more vast, the choices more sage?”

“I don't see her anymore. We don't even go through the motions. Ozren had been right about one thing: some stories just don't have happy endings.”

“All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse’s pudgy face.”

“I held it out and Caleb took it. This was the first book he had held in his hands. He made me smile, opening it upside down and back to front, but he touched the pages with the utmost care, as if gentling some fragile-boned wild thing. The godliest among us did not touch the Bible with such reverence as he showed to that small book.”