It's a mining town in lotus land.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him — as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

She admired him; she was used to clutching her hands together in his wake and heaving audible sighs.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

How different it all was from what you'd planned.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.