I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion.

Madame Ratignolle hoped that Robert would exercise extreme caution in dealing with the Mexicans, who, she considered, were a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful. She trusted she did them no injustice in thus condemning them as a race. She had known personally but one Mexican, who made and sold excellent tamales, and whom she would have trusted implicitly, so soft-spoken was he. One day he was arrested for stabbing his wife. She never knew whether he had been hanged or not.

I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion.

She was moved by a kind of commiseration... a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium.

The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn't seem like the same woman.

Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.

A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled, down, down to the water