“It was a few minutes before Helena could stop panting. She dared not read any further, or she’d crash through the connecting door and ravish Hastings—and she was far from sure how she felt about him.-- As she was reading the manuscript of The Bride of Larkspear”

“Some lovers were fortunate enough to grow old together. They’d grown old apart. She did not think him any less handsome. She only wished that she’d been there when the first line on his face had appeared, so that she could have stroked and kissed and cherished it.”

“The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring.For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman’s beauty.She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.He could have lived with this if only he’d kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew.”

“He’d gone into their marriage determined that she would never be alone again. In the end, she’d made him as alone in the world as she.”

“Once theexhilaration of their reunion wore off, once the newness of their lovemaking was no longer sonew, how would she see him? No matter how careful he was, invariably someday he woulddo something to make her angry. What then? Would all the old unhappiness rush to the fore?Would she remember that he had once betrayed her and regret that she’d ever given him asecond chance?Or would she protect herself from the beginning by keeping a certain distance from him, sothat their closeness would always fall short of true communion, always denying him that finalforgiveness so that he could never hurt her again?”

“The worst thing about falling in love with her so early in life was that he’d been an absolute snot at fourteen, at once arrogant and self-pitying. Almost as bad was the fact that he’d been nearly half a foot shorter than she at their first meeting —she’d been five foot nine, and he barely five foot four. Though she was only a few weeks older than he was, she’d looked upon him as a child—while he broiled with the heat and anguish of first love.When nothing else garnered him her attention, he turned horrid. She was disgusted by this midget who tried to trick her into broom closets to steal kisses, and he was at once miserable and thrilled. Disgust was better than indifference; anything was better than indifference.”

“For the next three seconds, he still dared to let himself hope.Perhaps she was making a grand entrance. Perhaps she would be carried in like Cleopatra, hidden in a roll of fine carpet.Perhaps—Three porters, grunting, pulled in a handcart.A crevasse opened before him and in fell his heart. No need to remove the tarpaulin wrapping. He recognized the stone slabby its size and weight.She had returned his present. She would have nothing more to do with him.”