“She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone.”

“Isabel wondered if there would ever be a time when she could stop being careful. If there would ever be a time when she could use other kinds of power. She missed it. It felt like part of her had been injected with novocaine and was totally numb. Almost dead" (p.35).”

“She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.”

“Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.”

“Because she deserved my tears if anyone on earth ever did. I could feel the tears within me, undiscovered, and untouched in their inland sea. Those tears had been with me always.”

“I wondered if she was trying to convey something to me, something she could not put into words - something prior to words that she could not grasp within herself and which therefore had no hope of ever turning into words.”