The House of Mirth

how can they see you in these holes where we're stuck?" That was the burden

dreaming."
"Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back—your old self rejects you, and shuts you out."

The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony: "Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't offer you?"

"Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?"

"I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

"Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living. Goodbye."

That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic."

is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised.

There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears

even her weeping
was an art