You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.

They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

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.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.

Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.