It is hard to be happy when one’s husband is a mirage, a peripatetic legerdemain of a man, a deception of all five senses.

Drowse, a tiny town in the north of England, looked, indeed, so somnolent that one suspected it might have been somehow mislaid among those misty, gentle-sloped fields where it had fallen asleep forever.

The man whom she had loved for his mute omniscience, stolid coarseness, grim perseverance in work, had stolen away.…

We must not spoil our fun with the small fry of osculatory contacts.

From the avenue came the clatter of cast counters and the stentorian, r-trilling voice of Elenski advising somebody to “keep trying.”

The portrait, after some obscure peregrinations, was acquired by the museum of Leroy’s native town.

in order to shed all the integument of exile, I would have to tear off and destroy my clothes, my linen, my shoes, everything, and remain ideally naked

or else his hand adumbrated a kind of beckoning gesture directed to no one in particular

What bliss it had been. Bliss—what a moist, lapping, and plashing word, so alive, so tame, smiling and crying all by itself.

Katya and I are not coevals. I was going on eighteen, and she on twenty.