This is a—a proposal of marriage?” he asked me, and there was the very smallest trace of a smile at the corner of his mouth, something I had never seen before. “I suppose so,” I said, blushing again. “And, as you see, I’m doing it properly, on my knees.” “This would, however, be a partnership of equals you’re offering, I imagine?” “Undoubtedly.” (448-49)

His thoughts inhabit a different plane from those of ordinary men; the simplest interpretation of that is to call him crazy.

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.

What I do . . . the path I tread . . . it brings some choices that test me hard.

a tree is never just a tree, it is bigger and deeper and wiser than a girl like you will ever be.

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.