“How could Mark be halfway across the world when she would have sworn he'd been in this room with her only seconds ago?”

“When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.”

“When he left her room tonight, she wanted his preference to be only her. His hands would only want her skin. He'd only fit perfectly with Severine.”

“She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.”

“How she listened, the first time, to the sonorous lamentations of romantic melancholia echoing out across heaven and earth! If her childhood had been spent in the dark back-room of a shop in some town, she would now perhaps have been kindled by the lyric surgings of nature which only normally reach us as through the interpretation of a writer.”

“By then she was dead. In fact, she may have been dead a while ago. Physically, several seconds ago, mentally, ages ago.”