“The whole story would have been speedily formed under her active imagination; and every thing established in the most melancholy order of disastrous love”

“It suddenly seemed to Laurel that all the absences in her own life, every loss and sadness, every nightmare in the dark, every unexplained melancholy, took the shadowy form of the same unanswered question, something that had been there since she was sixteen years old— her mother's unspoken secret.”

“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.”

“She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.”

“Looking at him now-even if she hadn't been in love with him, that part of her that was her mother's daugher, that loved every beautiful thing for its beauty alone, would still have wanted him.”

“Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.”