“Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn't being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love--it's being unhappy together.”

“Closing the door, Claudine looked at him. She looked at him, and while he waited for some expression to come to her face he knew how a doctor must feel sometimes when he looks at a belly. For her face was no more than a cover of skin, showing nothing of the terrible, complicated things, ugly and beautiful, that were going on inside her.”

“They were connected, one being, fused together. She belonged to him, and he to her.”

“Beauty he loved for its own sake; ugliness, which more often than not was a form of inverted beauty, fascinated him. Life offered far too little of either, and far too much appalling mediocrity, which he thought hideous.”

“But she never thought about the way Terrible looked, at least not that way. He hadn’t been ugly to her for months; he’d gone from just being a face she was familiar with to being a face she loved to look at, a face that made her….happy. Who gave a shit what anyone else saw when they looked at him, when they saw the crooked, many times broken nose, or the scars, or the jutting brow or thick jaw and heavy muttonchops? She knew what she saw, and that was all that mattered. Knew what was behind those hard dark eyes, and wanted it more than anything.”

“They were bound together by the things they’d done. Things the nobility could never comprehend being desperate enough to do”