I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you’re safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It’s the very reverse of what I want.
We shall hurt others less. Isn’t it, after all, what you always wanted?
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
I can’t love you unless I give you up.
It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be.
Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it’s always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.
She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision.
In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.