Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace

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.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Luckily the inconsequent life is not the only alternative; for caprice is as ruinous as routine. Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.