What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

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

Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.

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.

It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

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.