“Every...woman," the old lady said, "loves a ...rogue.”

“May intelligent, bookish ladies sometimes be reformed?" he asked her.She thought about it."I suppose it may be within the bounds of possibility," she said, "even if not of probability.”

“After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life.”

“I am free, you see," she said, "to love or to withhold love. Love and dependence need no longer be the same thing to me. I am free to love. That is why I love you, and it is the way I love you.”

“When I was nineteen," she said, "I was in love with being in love, I think. And I was given no chance to discover how deep - or not deep - that love would have gone.”

“By the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting—a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that hadhad to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist—even, perhaps, a murderer—could not take away from her.”

“Love does not last forever, then?""He asked me the same thing this morning," she said. "No, it does not - not love that has been betrayed. One realizes that one has loved a mirage, someone who never really existed. Not that love dies immediately or soon, even then. But it does die and cannot be revived.”