“I think I grew up that night. It might have been Patrick that lost his virginity, but it was me that lost my innocence.”

“Do you think that an eyeful of breast and buttocks will have me so besotted that I will forget all my principles? I'm a virgin, Mrs Farleigh. Not an innocent. I've never been an innocent.”

“If I’d been there, I might have been able to do something. But I wasn’t, and I lost them.”“And if you’d been there,” Ty said softly, “I would have lost you.”

“I did, of course, on both counts, and started going out with the boy I lost my virginity to - all of it. He lost his to me too, except that neither of us felt we had lost anything - just discovered the meaning of life and love and everything else unnecessary in between.”

“For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.”

“I wept to think that life went on even when so much had been lost, that rain still fell and myrtle grew between the rocks.”