He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.

I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.