Yet her physical beauty was as strong a part of her character ... Its first and lasting impression was one of vitality and endurance. That is to say, of power: a power as self-contained, as unoppressi...
She was coming to look on men and women as fellow survivors; well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or just put to use their own destruction. Of th...
Even Grace still imagined there might be words, the words that could reach Dora and that had so far, unaccountably, not been hit upon. Only Caro recognized that Dora's condition was exactly that: a co...
Paul said, 'You always had some contempt for me.''Yes.''And love too.''Yes.' A flicker over her stare was the facial equivalent of a shrug. 'Now you have a wife to give you both.
It mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. [p. 87]
I have never suffered greatly ... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you've won. You've got away with it.
Chief Coordinator of DALTO – the Department of Aid to the Less technically Oriented, working to induce backwards nations to come forwards.
Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible,...
But tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder, from the cauterized state of my own emotions then, whether those who have sup...
He had seen how people came a cropper by giving way to impulse. It was to his judiciousness, at every turn, that he owed the fact that nothing terrible had ever happened to him.
When you realize someone is trying to hurt you, it hurts less.Unless you love them.
They walked off on the earthy path, laughing not quite naturally, for they could hardly help being pleased by the momentary attention of descending passengers and by their own almost meritorious youth...
Sometimes, as now, her heart twisted and broke under his determination to wound her. At others, she was almost convinced that she felt nothing more for him, that he had overdrawn on her endurance: the...
She had a slow, deliberate way of walking -- as if she had once been startled into precipitate action and had regretted it.
Nothing, Ismet thought, makes a more fanatical official than a Latin. Organization is alien to their natures, but once they get a taste for it they take to it like drink. They claim to be impulsive, b...
Her eyes were enlarged and faded with discovering what, by common human agreement, is better undivulged.
Did you love Paul Ivory?Yes.I suppose it ended badly.Yes.You must have been very unhappy.I died, and Adam resurrected me.
Dark had meant Dora, had meant words and events sordid with self. Struggling to the light from Dora's darkness, Caro had acquired conscience and equilibrium like a profound, laborious education. Exerc...
I said, Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere,knows the whole thing. [p. 38]
He worked in Interim Reports, before being upgraded to Annual Reports.