The rain beat softly upon the shingles, inviting them to drowsiness and sleep. But they dared not yield. The rain was over; and the sun was turning the glistening world into a palace of gems.

She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality.

The Doctor...told the old ever-new and curious story of the waning of a woman's love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest.

She seemed to have apprehended all of the composer's coldness and none of his poetry.

I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not.

I love you. Good-by--because I love you.

His coming was in the nature of a welcome disturbance; it seemed to furnish a new direction for her emotions.

She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.

A general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon everyone as they saw the pianist enter.

I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others [...]

I have said it before, but I don't think I have ever came so near meaning it.

If ever a fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely their union.

[Edna lived] a dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions

One must possess many gifts … which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover … the artist must possess the courageous soul.

I couldn't help loving you if you were ten times his wife; but so long as I went away from you and kept away I could help telling you so.

If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours', I should laugh at you both.

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.

By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex.

They had been permitted to sit up till after the ice-cream, which naturally marked the limit of human indulgence.

His manner invited easy confidence. The preliminary stage of becoming acquainted was one which he always endeavored to ignore when a pretty and engaging woman was concerned.

Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate.

You are the embodiment of selfishness.

And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.

The morning was full of sunlight and hope.

I would give my life for my children, but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me

I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much - so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.

It is bizarre to treat all differences as oppositions,

She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in.

She wanted to destroy something. The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear.

She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual.

Don't go; don't go! Oh! Edna, stay with me.

Don't part from me in any ill humor. I never knew you to be out of patience with me before.

Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional, intense longing.

There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual.