“I was moved, too, to see her excited as a child--but no, for there is no childhood excitement to equal the adult journey to the beloved.”

“...while Norah described to me her plans for carpets and curtains, or showed me the sample of bedspread material she had hung over a chair to see if she could live with it. When I began to know her, I wondered if their courtship had been, for her, something of the same -- my brother draped over a chair for the statutory length of time, to see if she could live with him. In that case she might have noticed that he did not really go with the surroundings; perhaps she did see this, but knew that he would fade to a better match.”

“Paul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.''Yes.''And love too.''Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.”

“Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point...' -- as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent.”

“... I was often, later on, to act out with Giaconda a circumspection I did not feel: her abundance made others reticent; her openness evoked discretion.”

“I see that you are highly defensive." . . .Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude.”

“In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.”