...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.

With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

There was once a little girl who was so very intelligent that her parents feared that she would die. But an aged aunt, who had crossed the Atlantic in a sailing-vessel, said, 'My dears, let her marry the first man she falls in love with, and she will make such a fool of herself that it will probably save her life.

In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.