“Her face was calm, but inside she was tense.”

“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you'd seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”

“... but the corset had the odd power of making her seem somehow more naked; it turned her into a forbidden, armored creature with a soft side inside he had to hunt for.”

“In the end he became as fragmentary as the poems of Sappho he never succeeded in restoring, and finally one morning he looked up into the face of the woman who’d been the greatest love of his life and failed to recognize her. And then there was another kind of blow inside his head; blood pooled in his brain for the last time, washing even the last fragments of his self away.”

“Listening to Leonard, Madeleine felt impoverished by her happy childhood. She never wondered why she acted the way she did, or what effect her parents had had on her personality. Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.”