“I'd seen entire constellations of possibility I'd never previously been aware of, so blinded had I been by the bright, glaring stars of expectation. Freedom, I was beginning to think, had less to d...”

“College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did notintellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere be...”

“He was everything your mother warned you about when she told you not to walk alone in the dark.”

“No. I made that choice. I let all that anger and pain get twisted up in my thoughts for you. He leaned in. It fucking kills me. Every night. I relive what I did to you every night. His forehead res...”

“I'm not going to force you into anything you don't want. But I'm also not going to take a vow of chastity and pine away for you, or whatever the hell it is that men do in romance novels these days....”

“As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight.”

“Failed relationships can be described as so much wasted make-up.”

“Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.”

“Aside from the obvious, Francesca, what do you want in return for supplying information? Bones asked, getting back to the subject. You to take me, she replied at once. Not gonna happen! I spat, squ...”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“Tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than once.”

“Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible. [on hearing a famous violinist]”

“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.”