“As long as there is one house there must be one hand.”

“Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if one chose to take it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live and dream - a hundred years, forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart, as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain! She felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon like that; when it encircled and swelled with that image of gold.”

“He had missed the deepest of all companionships, a relation with the earth itself, with a countryside and a people. That relationship he knew cannot be gone after and found; it must be long and deliberate, unconscious. It must, indeed, be a way of living.”

“Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word "talent", which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there, it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day and must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the piano, just as a child with measles must be kept under the blankets.”

“He came to be very glad that he had known her, and that she had had a hand in breaking him in to life. He has known pretty women and clever ones since then,-- but never one like her, as she was in her best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one`s own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. "I know where it is," they seemed to say, "I could show you!”

“One is best in one's own country.”

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days...”