“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.”

“Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.”

“Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.”

“Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....”

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”

“The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt the latent ache and realized that after all he had not come off unhurt.”

“Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.”