“Agatha surveys the garden, its rows of crinkled spring cabbages and beanstalks entwining bowers of hawthorn and hazel. The rosemary is dotted with pale blue stars of blossom and chives nod heads of tousled purple. New sage leaves sprout silver green among the brittle, frost-browned remains of last year's growth. Lily of the valley, she thinks, that will be out in the cloister garden at Saint Justina's by now.”

“When we say we have given up hope, all we are really doing is challenging Madame Fortune to prove us wrong.”

“One night when the moon was full, I explained to you about how the moon controls the tides, and you said I was like the moon and you were the sea, always following me about. And I said nothing, because I knew it was truly the other way around.”

“What a blessing it is we cannot see our futures.”

“Sometimes I dance, alone, to music no-one can hear but me. When I dance I feel the beat of the earth’s own heart rise through my feet and legs, through my loins and belly and into my chest, until my own heart beats in time with the earth’s. Then I wonder if you feel it too, beneath that portion of the earth’s crust where you stand, or walk, or lie, or dance too. Because always, when I’m dancing, I’m dancing with you.”

“By all the rules of modern fiction there should have been gunsmoke mingling its acrid blue with the brown haze of corral dust. Dead men should have fallen and been trampled...Nothing of this sort happened.”

“The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth.”