“She'd been an actress, an artist's model, once or twice a kept woman, through all a voracious reader.”

“She is a famous artists' model who claims to have been christened Topaz - even if this is true there is no law to make a woman stick to a name like that.”

“His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.”

“She'd lost two more pounds. A picture of the models she'd cut out of the magazine flashed through Kessa's mind. And the winner is... seventy-three!”

“If the atmosphere is to be foreboding, you must forebode on every page. If it is to be cold, you must chill, not once or twice, but until your readers are shivering.”

“A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one.”