“And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not... I kept on loving the pretty clothes - and not him at all.”

“I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn't see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes—and not him at all.”

“He was so pretty I wanted to frame him and put him on my nightstand in a totally non-creepy, non-Hannibal Lector skin-suit-wearing kind of way.”

“I have this love for Mattie. It was formed in me as he himself was formed. It has his shape, you might say. He fits it. He fits into it as he fits into his clothes. He will always fit into it. When he gets out of the car and I meet him and hug him, there he is, him himself, something of my very own forever, and my love for him goes all around him just as it did when he was a baby and a little boy and a young man grown.”

“Age had not made him less handsome, as is so often the case; it had simply made him less visible.”

“Oh! not handsome—not at all handsome. I thought him very plain at first, but I do not think him so plain now. One does not, you know, after a time.”