“I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”

“Do you know, Àntonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of any one else in this part of the world. I'd have liked you to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister- anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and my dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of time when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”

“The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.”

“So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o' the wisp. Not long ago you burned--your heart burned--in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all.""Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own? I have given my heart to another.""The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?""Yes.""You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.""Nonetheless, he has my heart. I hope your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it.”

“That's another thing that doesn't turn me off, sweetheart, knowin' that you come with those kids and you need to know that. You also need to know I want kids of my own, two of them. But I don't care, if this works out between me and you, that the kids we have will have an older brother and sister that don't have my blood, just my heart.”

“You don't have body parts there do you?" my mother interrupted. "I don't want to open the fridge and find a head on the shelf" Rodney laughed. "No Justina, it doesn't look like Jeffrey Dahmer's hideaway.”