And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

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

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.

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

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.