“I looked at her and she looked at me and we weren’t walking. We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like the extremely blue or extremely big of flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything. What interested me about the Duke’s eyes was the complexity of the color- she always said they looked like the bottom of trash-can bins, a swirl of green and brown and yellow but she was underselling herself she always undersold herself. Christ it was hard to unthink”

“Where were we?" she said. "Getting credit," I said."What about it?""Well, it's nice to get credit."The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. "Is it?" she said.”

“There was something about my face,she said, that she couldn't stand. Something about my eyes, the way I looked at her, the fact I even existed. She'd always tell me to stop looking at her. She'd always scream it. Like I might attack her. Stop looking at me, she'd scream. You just stop looking at me, she'd scream.She put my hand in the fire once.Just to see if it would burn, she said. Just to check if it was a regular hand, she said.I was 6 years old then.I remember because it was my birthday.”

“She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaning back against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things,”

“...often referred to herself as a bitch. It was a way of insulting herself and asserting herself simultaneously. She acted like a bitch when she was threatened. It was the only effective self-defense she had learned. The more frightened ... felt, the harder she lashed out. It was her offense and her defense.  ...the bitch was also ... the poet. She was a very sensitively constructed sending and receiving mechanism, extremely vulnerable and extremely wary.”

“And the way he looked at her was so intense, his big green eyes probing into her, like he approved of everything she held inside.”