Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.

She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her.

She looked just like a painting dying to speak.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

From the first time he’d met her, he’d sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people’s art and ideas...

for she was invaded by a kind of love which every girl has gone through — the love of the unknown, love in its vaguest form,

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.

She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception of her, and love of her.

He was conscious of an emptiness that made him see Komako’s life as beautiful but wasted, even though he himself was the object of her love; and yet the woman’s existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin. He pitied her, and he pitied himself.

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.

The midnight hours were her time to be selfish and vain

She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time — because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.

From that time on she lived in lonely caves.