“If a woman could win love with her body, the world would have no bastards.”

“Surely this is what death would be like: nothingness, oblivion, as the world continued to turn, heedless of her absence.”

“—that if she touched him right now, their flesh would recognize each other. The wildest thought: these scars, his and hers, would speak to each other, communicating intimacies that could not be unshared.”

“For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first!”

“I admit, that the brain does not govern the body as well as one might wish- else all men would be saints and hell would be empty of lechers.”

“She wished he could make her somehow indelibly his; that they were still children so they could cut their fingers and mingle their blood and know this meant something. She longed for some transformation more lasting than that wrought by the law and his name, some visceral change he might effect in her so that anyone on the street with one glance would know she was his.”

“He knew himself well enough to know his own faults. Impatient and judgmental and stubborn and often too quick to act: he would try never to crush her, never to overwhelm her or bend her to his will, but if she did not demand only the best from him, it would happen. It might happen. Possibly.”