“With the way the light shone on her, she looked spotlighted, as if a painter had rendered her that way, the center of someones world.”

“She shook her head. She was so pale under the diffuse lamp-light that she looked almost transparent, as if Simon could have looked right through her. The way, he supposed, he always had.”

“She loved books. She loved them with her senses and her intellect. They way they looked and smelled; the way they felt in her hands; the way the pages seemed to murmur as she turned them. Everything there is in the world, she thought, is in books.”

“...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.”

“Tipping her head, she stared into his tawny, hazel eyes, so intense, so burning-hot and all-consuming. Had she ever had a man look at her like that? Like she was all? Like she was everything? The center of his universe? Hell, screw the center … Law was looking at her like she was his universe.”

“Her shame, she was certain, marked her in ways apparent to anyone who looked closely. It had grown to her like a second skin”