“The kind of eyes that jumped from a woman's dreams right into her morning and made trouble in the marriage bed.”

“I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, thinking that nobody really likes marriage, that it's a flawed arrangement, that people get enthusiastic and jump in for a hundred reasons and then, after the ceremony, after a few years, the whole deal turns into a concert they wouldn't have dreamed of attending.”

“Yancey crawled from her tangled bed one morning and assembled her long limbs and sharp bones into something as exotic and seductive to the eye as a peacock or a griffin or a unicorn.”

“Is this a dream?" The words spilled from her mouth.Owen's grip on her hand tightened, that lone dark eye trapped her with its serious intensity. "Waking up across from you is the stuff of which dreams are made. But, no.”

“In early days, I tried not to give librarians any trouble, which was where I made my primary mistake. Librarians like to be given trouble; they exist for it, they are geared to it. For the location of a mislaid volume, an uncatalogued item, your good librarian has a ferret’s nose. Give her a scent and she jumps the leash, her eye bright with battle.”

“He was lying in bed with the woman he loved . . . a woman he couldn't make love to. He closed his eyes. More than any­thing in this world, he wanted this woman to be happy. He'd give her anything, do anything to make her happy. Even if it made his own life hell.”