“It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.”

“In the end things must be as they are and have always been--the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare.”

“Once I have fairly seized you, to have and to hold, I'll just -figuratively speaking - attach you to a chain like this' (touching his watchguard). 'Yes, bonny wee thing, I'll wear you in my bosom, lest my jewel I should tyne.”

“Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.”

“[The shells] do not have the meaning they once did, but, as Swann said in Remembrance of Things Past, "even when one is no longer attached to things, it's still something to have been attached to them." (22)”

“Bonnie who had never hurt a - a harmless thing for malice. Bonnie who was like a kitten making airy pounces at no prey at all. Bonnie with her hair that was called something strawberry but that looked simply as if it was on fire. Bonnie of the translucent skin with the delicate violet fjords and estuaries of veins all over her throat and inner arms. Bonnie who had lately taken to looking at him sideways with her large childlike eyes big and brown under lashes like stars...”