“Never has anyone been so willing to be ruined as you were.”

“Ian Sterling has ruined me. And he's ruined me for anyone else.”

“It is never late, you can start the movement now, the provisions have been made, the price has been paid and the gifts have been packaged. Are you willing to change?”

“I wondered how anyone could have been so sure about a concept so tenuous and impossible as always that they'd be willing to carve it into a tabletop.”

“He has never known a woman so free from conceit, vanity, ambition, pretense. He has never known a woman so willing to show the world that she is a human being.”

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”