“It was all so artificial. It was beautiful, but it did not belong to her. She was a tourist, an outsider, and she could only see the thin surface veneer of things; she couldn't get beneath it to the real heart of anything.”

“At times such as these, evenings in the forest, loneliness seized her like a black dog. She kept telling herself it was pure weakness, that she had to be strong to stay alive in this world. Her orphanhood hung about her like a cloak. You shall not feel sorry for yourself, she commanded, and then disobeyed... beneath the surface veneer of stubborn independence, she needed desperately to belong to somebody.”

“She did not want to talk of her sorrow, but with that sorrow in her heart she could not talk of outside matters.”

“Mosca had been so busy working the oars of her little plan that she had failed to see the iceberg upon which it was doomed to founder. And now here it was in front of her, a towering glacial mountain of selfishness, and she could not understand how she could have missed it. How vast was it? How far beneath the surface did it go?”

“Maybe all of her strangeness, her curse, her always feeling like an outsider, had all existed so that she could belong here, with Peter.”

“It seemed as if I could see things in her that others couldn't see, qualities which not even she was aware of. It was as I I could already see in her the woman she would later become.”