“She was not somebody who'd assume other people would want to hear about her unhappiness.”

“Assuming that all things are equal,Who'd want to be men of the people,When there's people like you?”

“You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.”

“She was not sure that her deafness had strengthened her character. She was not even sure she had met a challenge. A silent world was as natural to her as a noisy one must be to them, she reflected. But people tended to assume that deaf persons could function as people only if they learned to conform to a world of sound. What about the challenge of silence? Very few people of hearing ever accepted it or even knew that there was a challenge there. People of hearing feared silence...”

“She didn't want to think about how wrong this was or how foolish it was to give herself to a known seducer. Because tonight Oliver wasn't that man. Not to her. He was the boy who'd cried over his dead mother, the young man who'd lost himself in drink and women to forget the past, the marquess who'd vowed not to marry for money. He was the man to be her lover.”

“... and people who have kids, people with husbands and jobs and mortgages, don't much want to hear about other people's paintings.”