“Beauty, grace, and charm my foot. It's a school for sadists with good tea-serving skills.”

“It's just a little initiation we have here at Spence - we like to torture each other. Beauty, grace, and charm my foot. It's a school for sadists with good tea-serving skills.”

“The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.”

“Welcome to finishing school, Gemma. Learn to embroider, serve tea, curtsy. Oh, and by the way, you might be demolished in the night by a hideous winged creature from the roof.”

“the dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown...”

“He was my equal in beauty, a paragon of grace and charm, sparkling with wit, and burning with love. I adored him to distraction, to the point of idolatry: I loved him as one can never love twice.”