“They were a mother's words, words I would say to my own daughter if I were concerned for her”

“Say something worth the words.”

“We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.”

“I never said I didn't want to marry. It just didn't happen-Iam not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and too serious. Now I am reconciled to being on my own.”

“He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.”

“I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.”

“I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home”