“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.”
“A dull mind ... is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which [an] inference started was purely problematic.”
“It was wicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her.”
“Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.”
“Marriage, like religion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward requirement.”
“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”
“The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”
“It seemed to him that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to bitterness.”
“When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in."
“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilette, and never see the great soul in a man's face”