“Caroline, sister of William, was trained by him as a singer in the Bath days and had considerable success in Handel's oratorios under her brother's conductorship. (The method of training adopted was for her to sing the violin parts of concertos with a gag in her mouth.) It was with great reluctance that she dropped music to be trained as an assistant astronomer, yet she made discoveries — eight minor planets, one of them named after her.”

“On the ride home after a long day at school, Livia commanded her eyes to look at the floor of the train and not search for him. But they took direct orders from her heart and combed the platform as the train pulled in.”

“Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.”

“When classmates had presumed to know the inner workings of her race and class - inferring their inherent laziness, lack of motivation, welfare dependency and intellectual deficiency-she had stopped up her ears and gradually trained her eyes not to see. Yet rage had turned her body against itself, transforming her stomach into an acidic mass that heaved bitterness into her mouth.”

“Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.”

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine... But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine...”