“We have a name for your disease. We call it a hyper-aesthetic one. You have been encouraged to over-indulge yourself in literature; and have inflamed your organs of fancy.”

“You're not sure? Look at your own fingers. Are you not sure, if they are yours? Look at any part of you - it might be me that you are looking at! We are the same, you and I. We have been cut, two halves, from the same piece of shinning matter. Oh, I could say, I love you - that is a simple thing to say, the sort of thing your sister might say to her husband. I could say that in a prison letter, four times a year. but my spirit does not love yours - it is entwined with it. Our flesh does not love: our flesh is the same, and longs to leap to itself. It must do that or wither! You are like me.”

“Your twisting is done--you have the last thread of my heart. I wonder: when the thread grows slack, will you feel it?”

“It was done the day you took me to that house in Bryanston Square, she said. Or even, the time before that, when you bought me tea. We stood in the sun, and you closed your eyes and I looked at your face...I think it was done then, Julia.”

“clad not exactly as a boy but, rather confusingly, as the boy I would have been, had I been more of a girl”

“Being in love, you know... it's not like having a canary, in a cage. When you lose one sweetheart, you can't just go out and get another to replace her.”

“It is a world that is made of love. Did you think there is only the kind of love your sister knows for her husband? Did you think there must be here, a man with whiskers, and over here, a lady in a gown? Haven't I said, there are no whiskers and gowns where spirits are? And what will your sister do if her husband should die, and she should take another? Who will she fly to then, when she has crossed the spheres? For she will fly to someone, we will all fly to someone, we will all return to that piece of shining matter from which our souls were torn with another, two halves of the same. It may be that the husband your sister has now has that other soul, that has the affinity with her soul—I hope it is. But it may be the next man she takes, or it may be neither. It may be someone she would never think to look to on the earth, someone kept from her by some false boundary...”