What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
Edith WhartonHe had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Edith WhartonFor hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.
Edith Wharton