“Don't you remember that love, like medicine, is only the art of encouraging nature?”

“When one woman strikes at the heart of another, she seldom misses, and the wound is invariably fatal.”

“How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach.”

“You may conquer her love of God: you will never overcome her fear of the devil.”

“He'd call me false and faithless and I've always had a weakness for those two words; next to cruel, they're the nicest words for a woman to hear, and not so hard to earn.”

“Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.”

“What the world stigmatizes as romantic is often more nearly allied to the truth than is commonly supposed.”

“Sky, wait. The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary way Sky.”

“I'm not going to do it again," Lena Marquez whispered to the red purse across the hall from her nestle of blankets. "Never again.”