“First maid:If I was a princess, with silver and gold,And loved by a hero, I'd never grow old:Oh, if a young hero came a-marrying me,I'd always be beautiful, happy, and free!Chorus:Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -The water below is as dark as the grave,And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat - It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat.”

“Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave -The water below is as dark as the grave,And maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat -It's hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat”

“Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body.”

“It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.”

“All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.”

“Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.”

“All those years I'd kept an outline of my father in my head, like a chalk line enclosing a father-shaped space. When I was little, I'd coloured it in often enough. But those colours had been too bright and the outline had been too large...”