“She was bored. She loved, had capacity to love, for love, to give and accept love. Only she tried twice and failed twice to find somebody not just strong enough to deserve it, earn it, match it, but even brave enough to accept it.”

“She had to have faith not just in trying but in failing. Was she strong enough to fail Was she strong enough not to”

“She had fallen in love with him twice. She loved him now with both loves, so overpowering it was almost unbearable.”

“I'm not looking for love," she tried to explain."If it comes my way, that makes it twice as special.”

“She was brave, wasn’t she? Look what she’d done. She hadn’t run back to the safety of San Francisco, but toward something dangerous and unknown. And Oscar had gone with her. He was it, the man she wanted to be with, and not just in sporadic or imagined trysts, Camille slowed her crawling as it dawned on her. She loved him. She loved Oscar Kildare. She loved him enough to give up everything she’d ever known.”

“Everyone should be lucky enough to be loved for a long time. To know what that was like--to be loved and to change, to be privileged to suffer it, to remain. To know, as she did, that there was only one person she could ever love. To know it incontrovertibly. To accept it, with all the attendant limits. Once you did, it was the closest thing there was to safety.”