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

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

Her vivid smile was like a light held up to dazzle me.

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.

Every house is a mad-house at some time or another.

After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.