“As a child, my own mother told me the human heart spun on an axis smaller than a dime. Like her father, she sold "life for love" insurance. For the price of ten years off your life, you could purchase insurance on a ten-year love affair. Plans were also available in increments of twenty-five and fifty. If your love affair failed before your insurance expired, they'd provide you with a clone of the loved one for the duration of the term. Sometimes the clone worked out even better than the original.”

“Finally, Elizabeth understood that she had been orphaned not once but twice when her mother passed away. She lost her father as surely as her mother on the day of her birth. All those years, she idealized the earl’s devotion to her mother’s memory and ignored the price she herself paid. She grew up a lonely child, envying a beloved spectral being and wishing someday for an undying, perfect love of her own in compensation.   Her next thought stunned her: she would never wish that childhood on any child of hers.”

“By Jove, what claptrap! Love can turn to contempt in the blink of an eye. When it sours, believe me, only bitterness and misery remain. Such disappointment spoils all other affection. Whereas mature, reasonable expectations cannot be disappointed, my lady, because they can be fulfilled.” “I will not marry without love, my lord.”“Nor will I pretend to love in order to marry,” he growled in reply. “I won’t spout drivel to stoke your overheated fantasies. If we can rub along, that is enough for me. In return, I will honor you, provide for you and protect you.”   “My father loved my mother deeply, devotedly. He loves her to this day. That is perfect, enduring love.”   “I cannot promise you perfection.”   “It’s not impossible to love with devotion. Swans mate for life, why can’t I?” “Perhaps because you are not an aggressive water fowl with a brain the size of an acorn. You have the option to act as a rational creature and accept that there is no such thing as perfect love in reality.”  “ I will not settle for less.” “By all means, don’t settle, Lady Elizabeth,” Clun said and rudely stood up to leave. “Don’t settle for me. Hold out for a poet. Or more appealing waterfowl for all I care. In the meantime, do not presume to lecture me about the proper basis of marriage, as if you knew better than I.”

“It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.”

“For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I blinked and was in love with her again.”

“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”

“I started thinking about life insurance and how nice it would be if you could get insurance that your life would be happy, and that everyone you knew could be happy, and they could all do what they really wanted to do, and they could all find the people they wanted to find.”