"It was like she was so empty there wasn't even a feeling or thought in her."

"And why did everyone persist in thinking the mute was exactly as they wanted him to be--when most likely it was all a very queer mistake?... In the battling tumult of voices he alone was silent."

"Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty."

"The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known."

"His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years."

"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."

"I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror."

"I got to wear blinders all the time so I won't think sideways or in the past."

"And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow."

"But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all."

"Us going to have a cup of coffee. Then maybe it all won't seem so bad."

"Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences. He tried to word them so that a man would think."

"To the lost, transfixed among the self-inflicted ruins, All that is non-air (if this indeed is not deception) Is agony immobilized. While Time, The endless idiot, runs screaming round the world."

"Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen."

"I wish I was somebody else except me."

"That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended."

"Why did he go onward? Why did he not rest here upon the bottom of utmost humiliation and for a while take his content? But he went onward."

"That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name."

"You don't know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real."

"He nearly always put his hand on his friend's arm and looked for a second into his face before leaving him."

"Coming down was the hardest part of any climbing."

"You mind Ralph," she called back to Bubber. "Mind the gnats don't sit on his eyelids."

"It was almost three o'clock, the most stagnant hour in the day or night."

"Nothing had really changed....The people dreamed and fought and slept as much as ever. And by habit they shortened their thoughts so that they would not wander out into the darkness beyond tomorrow."

"In her heart it didn't give her near the same feeling that music did. Nothing was really as good as music."

"There was a hollow in her chest, but at the bottom of this emptiness a heavy weight pressed down and bruised her stomach, so that she felt sick."

"You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around your name."

"People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable."

"People, unless they are nilly-willy or very sick, cannot be taken into the hands and be changed overnight into somthing more worth-while and profitable."

"He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a long time with foreigners in South America."

"Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was the symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen."

"A person can't pick up they children and just squeeze them to which-a-way they wants them to be."

"The world is certainty a sudden place."

"It wasn't like she was lonely and in fact – she had understood it all in every way except with her brain. Now she knew that she knew."

"After such mornings he returned to the show with relief. It eased him to push through the crowds of people. The noise, the rank stinks, the shouldering contact of human flesh soothed his jangled nerves."

"It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house."

"She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize she ought to leave the town."

"Son, do you know how love should be begun?" The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old man leaned closer and whispered: "A tree. A rock. A cloud."

"They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?"

"You think out everything in your brain. While us rather talk from something in our hearts that has been there for a long time. That's one of them differences."

"There was none of the quiet insolence about this man."

"A person's got to fight for every single thing they get,' she said slowly. 'And I've noticed a lot of times that the farther down a kid comes in the family the better the kid really is."

"To me it is the irony of fate,” she said. “The way they come here. Those moths could fly anywhere. Yet they keep hanging around the windows of this house."

"Sometimes he thought that he had talked so much in the years before to his children and they had understood so little that now there was nothing at all to say."

"He was thinking that in nearly every person there was some special physical part kept always guarded."

"He could not understand the wild quiver of his heart, nor the following sense of recklessness and grace that lingered after she was gone."

"She had always kept things to herself. That was one sure truth."

"The loneliness in him was so keen that he was filled with terror. Usually he had a pint of bootleg white lightning. He drank the raw liquor and by daylight he was warm and relaxed."

"The mutual distrust between the men who were just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave everyone a feeling of estrangement."

"In one of their quarrels, they had begun calling each other Mister. and Misses., and since then they had never made it up enough to change it."