"Every moment of every day and night he was able to take the measure of his failure now. Even his family's poverty which for years he had refused to admit, began to grow familiar to him, but like the memory of a companion that one has left behind. Rose-Anna...She'd been a young girl at his side, then tired, then overwhelmed, and here she was sleeping beside him on a kind of pallet, on the floor. He could hear the whimpers from the children in their sleep."

“They could see the rapids on their right. The swaying of the bus made her sick and weak, and her willpower was failing with her strength. She was afraid of falling into a torpor in which everything would become immaterial to her, and she tensed in an effort to seem gay and even attentive to Emmanuel.”

“I'm probably goin' to be promoted, and it'll be more than twenty bucks you'll get then, you just wait. You'll have enough to live on, Ma . You won't have to scrape all your life, the rest of us'll see to that.”

“Why did she have to wake up this morning? Or ever! But especially this morning. Her stare took on a glint of panic. Then she thought: Oh! This is my wedding day!”

“The more the heart is sated with joy, the more it becomes insatiable.”

“Home! That was an old word, one of the first the children had ever learned. You used it without thinking, a hundred times a day. It had meant so many different things!..Home was an elastic word and even meaningless at times....”

“Her shoulders sagging, her back hunched, her eyelids tired, Rose-Anna sewed for the feast, not daring even to sing for fear of frightening off her joy.”