“I had a perfect life in my reach once, and it was a crashing bore. Perfect is too clean, too easy. I don't want perfect any more than I want to be perfect. I want imperfect.”

“When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say "more perfect" because she said if a thing is perfect it can't be more so. But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.”

“She had wanted more than she could have.She had wanted him, and more... she had wanted him to want her.In the name of something bigger than tradition, bolder than reputation, more important than a silly title.”

“You are beautiful and brilliant and bold and so very passionate about life and love and those things that you believe in. And you taught me that everything I believed, everything I thought I wanted, everything I had spent my life espousing--all of it...it is wrong. I want your version of life...vivid and emotional and messy and wonderful and filled with happiness. But I cannot have it without you.”

“She did not want to be that woman - the one of whom they spoke. She had never planned to be that woman. Somehow, it had happened, however...somehow, she had lost her way and, without realizing it, she had chosen this staid, boring life instead of a different, more adventurous one.”

“I forbid you from frequenting taverns, public houses, or other establishments of vice.”She snorted in amusement. “Establishments of vice? That’s a rather puritanical view of things, isn’t it? I assure you, I was quite safe.”“You were with Ralston!” he said, as though she were simpleminded.“He was perfectly respectable,” she said, the words coming out before she remembered that the carriage ride home was anything but respectable.“Imagine—my sister and the Marquess of Ralston together. And he turns out to be the respectable one,” Benedick said wryly, sending heat flaring on Callie’s cheeks, but not for the reason he thought. “No more taverns.”

“I really don't think anyone can blame us for wanting no part of the marriage mart if she is already the belle of the ball," Ella said. "My mother even hadthe audacity to ask me earlier if I didn't think I should have a gown made like hers! Lord deliver me from the London season”