Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.

..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.