“He couldn’t believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer’s privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.”

“Good night, Lisa. Sleep with the angels."Her eyes stung from quick tears. It had been her mother's nightly benediction: Sleep with the angels. But then he added words her mother never had: "Then come back to earth and sleep with your devil, who would burn in hell for one night in your arms.”

“Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.”

“You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you".”

“ She was not certain what she wanted from life, or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way - because she willed it to be so - her wants and her expectations were the same. For a while after their marriage she was in such demand that it was not unpleasant when he fell asleep. Presently, however, he began sleeping all night, and it was then she awoke more frequently, and looked into the darkness, wondering about the nature of men, doubtful of the future, until at last there came a night when she shook her husband awake and spoke of her own desire. Affably he placed one of his long white arms around her waist; she turned to him then, contentedly, expectantly, and secure. However, nothing else occurred, and in a few minutes he had gone back to sleep. This was the night Mrs. Bridge concluded that while marriage might be an equitable affair, love itself was not.”

“For the first time in his life he was unable to think of himself as existing the next day. There would be a Eustace, he supposed, but it would be someone else, someone to whom things happened that he, the Eustace of to-night, knew nothing about. Already he he felt he had taken leave of the present. For a while he thought it strange that they should all talk to him about ordinary things in ordinary voices; and once when Minney referred to a new pair of sand-shoes he was to have next week he felt a shock of unreality, as though she had suggested taking a train that had long since gone.”