“Hugo could cheerfully have died of mortification - if such a mass of contradictions had been possible.”

“Was there to be some healing after all?Was healing possible when grave damage had been done?Was wholeness possible when one had been horribly maimed.”

“She wondered if she would have tumbled into love with him during the past week if her heart had been whole, if her soul had no been shattered long ago. She rather thought she might have. But a heart and soul could not be mended by the power of the will, she had discovered over seven years. And so she had accepted reality and moved on.”

“But Ashley had always understood. He had always known there was a person behind the silence - not just a person who listened with her eyes and would have responded in similar words if she could have, but one who inhabited a world of her own and lived in it quiet as richly as anyone in his world. With Ashley there had always been a language. There had always been a way of giving him glimpses of herself.”

“Could a love of that magnitude die? If it was true love, could it ever die? Was there such a thing as true love?”

“But it was possible to teach what one could not practice.”

“Except that love - that mysterious, vast, all-encompassing power - could not possibly be contained in a single word.”