To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

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

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.

He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.

We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?

And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.