How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #4
He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her that she was free, he would see her flash her wings. (15.36)
On the first evening of their trip to North Yorkshire, Randolph Henry Ash imagines that Christabel LaMotte is looking at him like a captive bird. Unlike Mortimer Cropper, Randolph doesn't think of love as a form of possession: he values Christabel in freedom, not in captivity.
Quote #5
He thought of the Princess on her glass hill, of Maud's faintly contemptuous look at their first meeting. In the real world—that was, for one should not privilege one world above another, in the social world to which they both must return from these white nights and sunny days—there was little real connection between them. Maud was a beautiful woman such as he had no claim to possess. She had a secure job and an international reputation. (23.65)
It might come as some surprise to us as readers that Roland thinks in terms of "possessing" Maud as a lover. Among other things, this characteristic sets him apart from Randolph Henry Ash, who makes a conscious effort to convince Christabel LaMotte that he doesn't want to possess her.
Quote #6
He was in a Romance, a vulgar and a high Romance simultaneously, a Romance was one of the systems that controlled him, as the expectations of Romance control almost everyone in the Western world, for better or worse, at some point or another. (23.66)
When the novel speaks of Roland being in both a "vulgar" and a "high" Romance, it's pointing to the difference between the intensely idealistic conventions that we see in the romance of, say, Aragorn and Arwen in the The Lord of the Rings and the more sensational narratives that drive rom-coms like Bridget Jones's Diary.