“Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought ofliterature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must beher excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift aslightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold,literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking aboutduchesses.”

“Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.”

“When she talks to Tripp, something nice happens inside of her: a vibration, a thrum. It's as if a tiny wind chime is suspended inside her soul, she thinks, and his words are the wind that makes it ring.”

“At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.”

“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”

“The absurdity of it, she thought, this quest for the love of a man who was her equal. She loathed herself for it. She thought of her life (and herself) as a missed opportunity. Somewhere, back there, she had missed something. What was it? When was it? The worse horror beneath: that she hadn't missed anything, that her life was merely the sum of her choices and that her choices had led her to this: another truncated encounter; the carcinogenic belief in the idea of a Great Love; clammy sex; loneliness in the small hours.”