“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

“And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ...”

“Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

“There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.”

“[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.”

“If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to gratify it, even for a few weeks at a time. Now I was to know the joys of six or seven months a year among fields and woods of my own, and the childish ecstasy of that first spring outing at Mamaroneck swept away all restlessness in the deep joy of communion with the earth.”