“Her temperament has never been competitive; she immediately wants to disappear, to obliterate herself, to make way for them.”

“When I was born it was Simon who they'd put once more into his arms, the dream of a child he could mold in his own image. It certainly wasn't me, a half-baked attempt at life, a rough sketch showing no familiar traits whatsoever.”

“The vigor I lacked for physical activities became incandescent when, pen in hand, I filled those pages with invented stories. Sometimes they were intimately about me – family tales, parental exploits – sometimes they became horrific stories sprinkled with torture, death, and reunion: crazy games and tear-soaked sagas.”

“She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her.”

“Since then her life had been peaceful and happy. She had allowed herself to be worshipped by that strangely captivating lover of hers, whose passionately willful temperament, tempered by that persistent, sunny gaiety, she had up to now only half understood.”

“Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.”

“I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.”