“Who's this?" he said, coming across a name he didn't recognize. "Lady Georgina of Sandalhurst? Why are we inviting her? I don't know her. Why are we asking people we don't know?"I know her," Pauline replied. There was a certain steeliness in her voice that Halt would have done well to recognize. "She's my aunt, Bit of an old stick, really, but I have to invite her."You've never mentioned her before," Halt challenged.True. I don't like her very much. As I said, she's a bit of an old stick."Then why are we inviting her?"We're inviting her," Lady Pauline explained, "because Aunt Georgina has spent the last twenty years bemoaning the fact that I was unmarried. 'Poor Pauline!' she'd cry to anyone who'd listen. 'She'll be a lonley old maid! Married to her job! She'll never find a husband to look after her!' It's just too good an opportunity to miss."Halt's eyebrows came together in a frown. There might be a few things that would annoy him more than someone criticizing the woman he loved, but for a moment, he couldn't think of one.Agreed," he said. "And let's sit her with the most boring people possible at the wedding feast."Good thinking," Lady Pauline said. She made a note on another sheet of paper. "I'll make her the first person on the Bores' table."The Bores' table?" Halt said. "I'm not sure I've heard that term."Every wedding has to have a Bores' table," his fiance explained patiently. "We take all the boring, annoying, bombastic people and sit them together. That way they all bore each other and they don't bother the normal people we've asked."Wouldn't it be simpler to just ask the people you like?" Halt askede. "Except Aunt Georgina, of course--there's a good reason to ask her. But why ask others?"It's a family thing," Lady Pauline said, adding a second and third name to the Bores' table as she thought of them. "You have to ask family and every family has its share of annoying bores. It's just organizing a wedding.”

“See this ring? I'll ask her to be mine forever after the surgery, though I'm 99% sure she'll say yes, will you please make it 100%. God, I know it's too much to ask, but please don't take Ann yet, I need her. I need her so bad. And I feel that my heart will just burst into pieces when she's gone. It's not entirely her that I'll miss but every waking moment spent with her, that it feels like I miss her even if she's with me. I don't want to spend the rest of my life without her; she's the only reason why I'm here. So please, it's the only thing that I'll ask. Please don't take her yet.”

“Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw Jace shoot her a look of white rage - but when she glanced at him, he looked as he always did: easy, confident, slightly bored."In future, Clarissa," he said, "it might be wise to mention that you already have a man in your bed, to avoid such tedious situations.""You invited him into bed?" Simon demanded, looking shaken."Ridiculous, isn't it?" said Jace. "We would never have all fit.""I didn't invite him into bed," Clary snapped. "We were just kissing.""Just kissing?" Jace's tone mocked her with its false hurt. "How swiftly you dismiss our love.”

“I once asked her if she got bored living alone, and she said, 'To say one is bored to be alone is to admit that one has no inner resources.”

“She had been married to a man who had never bored her and these people bored her very much”

“...when I came back, I found Mom sobbing at the kitchen table...Then I asked her what had happened.'Nothing,'she said. 'I was thinking about that man...I started thinking about...if he and his wife and their other child are okay, and I don't know. It just got to me.''I know,' I said, because I did know. Sometimes it's safer to cry about people you don't know than to think about people you really love.”