“What is she writing? Watch her now,How fast her fingers move!How eagerly her youthful browIs bent in thought above!Her long curls, drooping, shade the light,She puts them quick aside.”

“You ask if she had beauty's grace? I know not - but a nobler faceMy eyes have seldom seen;A keen and fine intelligence,And, better still, the truest senseWere in her sparkling mien.”

“How strange this mass of ancient treasuresMementoes of past pains and pleasures;These volumes, clasped with costly stone,With print all faded, gilding gone”

“When words, half love, all tenderness,Were hourly heard, as hourly spoken,When the long, sunny days of blissOnly by moonlight nights were broken.”

“Because despite his money and his looks and all the good-on-paper attributes he possessed, he was not a reader, and, well,let's just say that is the sort of nonsense up with which we will not put.”

“She lay on her back and walked her fingers down her ribs, skipped them over her abdomen, and landed on her pelvic bones. She tapped them with her Knuckles. [. . .] I can hear my bones, she thought. Her fingers moved up from her pelvic bones to her waist. The elastic of her underpants barely touched the center of her abdomen. The bridge is almost finished, she thought. The elastic hung loosely around each thigh. More progress. She put her knees together and raised them in the air. No matter how tightly she pressed them together, her thighs did not touch.”

“The sight made her ache. How can I not touch you? she thought hopelessly, and then she was doing it, her fingers on his wrist. He didn't jump or even look at her, just stopped writing. Neither one of them moved, nothing moved, and the whole thing lasted three or four seconds at most, but when Pen took her hand away and started to breathe again, her chest hurt, as though she had been holding her breath for a very long time.”