“I am an anomaly - a woman alone, too young to be widowed and too old to be looking for a mate. I occupy that no man's land - no woman's land - between youth and old age.”

“Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man's land--too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.”

“I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.”

“I am too young to be called wise and I am too old to be called young.”

“As I looked and looked, the living face became visible in the dead, the young in the old. This is what must happen to old married couples, I thought: the young man is preserved in the old one for her, the beauty and grace of the young woman stay fresh in the old one for him.”

“I didn’t know then that young girls were a sort of poison, infectious to the man of age; and that men of age justly take woman of age to cure themselves of the diseases of youth.”