“Lorelei sat at the window of her drawing room, painting in the fading daylight. It was yet another portrait of Jack, her favorite piece of fruit.”

“He sat by her, watching every gesture she made, as if he would paint her portrait afterward.”

“Why? (Lorelei)Because I…(Jack)You? (Lorelei)I…(Jack)For an eloquent man, Captain Rhys, you seem to be stymied for an answer. (Lorelei)Lorelei, I don’t want any other man to ever touch you. (Jack)”

“She sat down on one of her grandmother's uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin's-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world ... Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.”

“They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had been waiting since she was fifteen. A rose and mauve lady that had not yet gathered her flesh and her beauty into dark clothes, and still waited, like a rose stripped of its petals, with her faded colors and her artificial smile, bitter as a grimace.”

“Every night I went into Hannah's room and sat with her stuff. The thing I couldn't get was how her clothes and her books and her drawings were still there, but she wasn't. It just didn't compute. Her room was a like a car without an engine, everything where it should be, except all it was was potential. None of it was going to get used again.”