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.

[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.

When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.

They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.