“I learned to love the feel of good words.”

“I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me.”

“Each woman is like an instrument, waiting to be learned, loved, and finely played, to have at last her own true music made.”

“That was another lesson I had learned perhaps too well: people meant pain.”

“What makes you think I am not teaching you? Aside from the fact that you refuse to learn.”

“If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.”

“In the hours that followed, I learned that Ademic hand gestures did not actually represent facial expressions. It was nothing so simple as that. For example a smile can mean you're amused, happy, grateful, or satisfied. You can smile to comfort someone. You can smile because you're content or because you're in love. A grimace or a grin look similar to a smile, but they mean entirely different things.Imagine trying to teach someone how to smile. Imagine trying to describe what different smiles mean and when, precisely, to use them in conversation. It's harder than learning to walk.”