Kate Chopin

"An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her with a vague anguish...like a shadow... a mist passing across her soul's summer day."

"Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with hi…"

"The years that are gone seem like dreams -if one might go on sleeping and dreaming- but to wake up and find -oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain …"

"She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle — a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of an…"

"All sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference."

"The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassion…"

"She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes."

"Sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking, and unguided."