She was trying to look tough and careless, but she just looked scared. He says he wanted to laugh, and, at the same time, something in her frightened eyes made him want to cry.

Her long narrow eyes darkened with whatever it was they were beginning to see.

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

It is absolutely hideous, so loud, so blatant, so impervious and cruel, that facing it causes mere vulgarity to seem an irrecoverable state of grace.

He is young, very, very young, but also very old; but not old in the way that she had expected him to be. She had expected the age of corruption.