“In her more lucid moments, she knew that half her life had been sacrificed to safeguard her secret heart, to appease that unreasonable, mortal dread she suffered of being suddenly revealed to others in a nakedness of spirit that terrified her more than the concept of God's own retribution itself.”

“Her own fearless audacity had surprised her, though she knew she had been born for more than her life had asked of her thus far.”

“It was her street, her neighborhood, her life. She knew that someday in the future it would not be hers anymore. But she would remember it, she would treasure it, she would miss it. She would hold it in her heart. She knew that someday she would look back at this very moment and miss it....Never had life seemed more beautiful and more sad.”

“She had sacrificed her childhood to save her brothers; she loved her family above all else, and her spirits yearned to return home once more, to the wild forest and the land of mystic tales and ancient spirits whence he had taken her. That was the place of her heart, and if he loved her, he must let her go.”

“The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it.Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.”

“If Shirley were not an indolent, a reckless, an ignorant being, she would take a pen at such moments, or at least while the recollection of such moments was yet fresh on her spirit. She would seize, she would fix the apparition, tell the vision revealed. Had she a little more of the organ of acquisitiveness in her head, a little more of the love of property in her nature, she would take a good-sized sheet of paper and write plainly out, in her own queer but clear and legible hand, the story that has been narrated, the song that has been sung to her, and thus possess what she was enabled to create. But indolent she is, reckless she is, and most ignorant; for she does not know her dreams are rare, her feelings peculiar. She does not know, has never known, and will die without knowing, the full value of that spring whose bright fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.”