“Her husband had archaic ideas about jewels; a man bought them for his wife in acknowledgement of things he could not gracefully utter.”

“He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage.”

“In spite of Stepan Arkadyevitch's efforts to be an attentive father and husband, he never could keep in his mind that he had a wife and children.”

“As to acknowledging that he was about to obtain a triumph with the ideas of another man, he never thought of such a thing. It is generally in perfect good faith that the jackdaw struts about in the peacock's feathers.”

“He was, she realised, quite graceful. The very idea surprised her. Male grace was a quality she'd never thought of beyond the ballroom; either a man could dance a quadrille with skill and without stepping on her feet or he could not. But here was another kind of grace altogether--and untrained grace, an instinctive animal grace.”

“When a man dies, his wife is burned alive with him, but if the wife dies before her husband, the man does not suffer the same fate. If a man dies before marriage, he is given a posthumous wife. The women passionately want to be burned because they believe they will enter paradise.”