“People keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast.”

“It might be that women who have beennurses should not marry physicians. They have too much respect for physicians, are taughtto have too much respect”

“The eighteen years he has lived seem but a moment, a breathing space in the long march of humanity. Already he hears death calling. With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another.”

“There is within every human being a deep well of thinking over which a heavy iron lid is kept clamped.”

“Many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”

“He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among these people he was always self-confident and bold. They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions of their own, but always he talked last and best. He was like a writer busy among the figures of his brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of New York.”

“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.”