“Let us put it the other way, the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic. The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel.”

“I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.”

“God,' she cried, 'what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you prepare for that? Everything we can't bear in the world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.... There's something evil in me that loves evil and degradation--purty's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?”

“Matthew,' she said, 'have you ever loved someone and it became yourself?'For a moment he did not answer.  Taking up the decanter he held it to the light.'Robin can go anywhere, do anything,' Nora continued, 'because she forgets, and I nowhere because I remember.'  She came toward him.  'Matthew,' she said, 'you think I have always been like this.  Once I was remorseless, but this is another love — it goes everywhere; there is no place for it to stop — it rots me away.”

“There goes the dismantled—Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman,” he thought to himself, “without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman,” he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, “and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere,” he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. “Out looking for what she’s afraid to find—Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home.”

“I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say “Love” and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog.”

“She was nervous about the future; it made her indelicate. She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time --because she could not let her time alone, and yet could never be a part of it. She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing. She had the fluency of tongue and action meted out by divine providence to those who cannot think for themselves. She was the master of the over-sweet phrase, the over-tight embrace.”