“Because what if I got to know you and you turned out to be just like they said? What if you weren’t the person I hoped you were?That, more than anything, would have hurt the most.”

“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you," he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like—not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!”

“I took a deep breath. 'For you I've got something better than love.'What's that?'I...trust you.'Why?'You'll never hurt me.'Thank you.'But...'But, what?'I said, 'That means I'll hurt you.'Why?' 'Cause, like I said, you'll never hurt me back.”

“But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said. You are hurting yourself. There is no way I can take this personally.”

“I don't want him hurt because he got out of hand with me.""Yet you would have shot him."I shrugged. "I never said I was consistent, just serious.”

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess; “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like it put more simply—‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”