“Manners, you see, come down to a single principle: talk of nothing that might actually prove interesting.”

“You interest me,' he said, and his tone suggested this fact itself surprised him, meant something more to him than perhaps it should: a man surprised by being interested was living a piss-poor facsimile of life, in her view.”

“And he wondered, suddenly, what sort of divide it created between them, that he knew pieces of her that she had never shared with him - facts and stories and moments and memories to which she had no idea he was privy. He had collected them for so long, denying to himself that this acquisition was anything more than casual amusement, when in fact it was zealous, and jelaous besides; diwowning as accidental the fact that he never forgot a single remark she made, or that others made about her, and that he approved of these other people, or disdained them, according to their treatment of her. Such a lopsided intimacy existed between him and her. Inevitably, it created a chasm whose depth neither of them could know until they tried to chart it. Would this chasm prove impossible to bridge?”

“You came for me,” she whispered.His hand wound through her hair, cradling her. “I will always come for you,” he said.”

“His slow smile might haved lured angels from heaven, flocking noisily, arms outstretched,happy to burn for him.”

“After a long moment, the Countess sat back down. "So," she said. "You … do love her. I must say, you look peculiarly resigned to it."He shrugged. "It is not fresh news for me.""And for Emma?""Neither welcomed nor openly acknowledged.""But acknowledged all the same, you believe.""Perhaps," he said. "I cannot know. Not anymore."-Delphinia, Lady Chad and Julian”

“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.”