“Molly was arrested. Possession.” I blinked at him. “She was possessed?”

“Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.”

“He does not possess wealth; it possesses him.”

“We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.”

“I don't possess these thoughts I have --- they possess me. I don't possess these feelings I have --- They obsess me.”

“Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels...”