The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow’s feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.

Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude continuously beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away its mobile power ; but in the still water of privacy every feeling and sentiment unfolds in visible luxuriance, to be interpreted as readily as a printed word by an intruder. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality.

The trauma she had endured often manifested itself as quiet tears once she was locked in her room, staring at her graveyard of photos.

as she spoke, she watched the expressions on the faces go from incredulous shock, to hopeful belief, and finally to awestruck acceptance

Now and then I see something in her eyes, and I wonder if I’ve ever grasped how much pain she’s really in.

Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

Instead, it had slipped into her subconscious, and worked its way beneath her skin. -

...she thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them.

By the time she had grown sharper,..., she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable- images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn't big enough to play.

the feelings flattened and folded and turned into something else, like emotional origami.

Since her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and related, and over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad.

In her face was the tense expression of an organism surviving in an alien element.

Once one had seen her eyes, the rest of the face grew vague, and when one tried to recall her image afterwards, only the piercing, questioning violence of the wide eyes remained.

The photos stirred feelings she couldn't quite frame in words, and this, she decided, must mean they were true works of art. (p99)