“The boy protested that she should not; she continued to declare that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.”

“The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.”

“Mary feels she should have been a boy and then everything would have been so much easier. She fights against her femininity in a way.”

“Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.”

“At first she was overjoyed that he would be with her, but then she recalled that human people could not live under the water, and he could only visit her father's palace as a dead man.”

“She appeared to be ageless the type that would continue, unchanging, until she was an old woman when she would suddenly become senile and die”