A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.

Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.

Until the raw ingredients of a pudding make a pudding, I shall never believe that the raw material of sensation and thought can make a work of art without the cook's intervening.

I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation.