Then he saw that she was blind, her face slightly upcast to her companion's in the manner of those whose expressions never fully attain their target — the eyes of another. (II)

Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.

She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention.

All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness—or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.
Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.

When a writer doesn't show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God's famous reluctance to appear.

He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.

Curious how he jibbed away from sight of his wife and child!
One would have thought he must have rushed up at the first moment. On the contrary, he had a sort of physical shrinking from it — fastidious possessor that he was. He was afraid of what Annette was thinking of him, author of her agonies, afraid of the look of the baby, afraid of showing his disappointment with the present and — the future.

He looked at her uncomfortably; blinking, you know, like one not sure whether he was awake or asleep.

Shyness is when you turn your head away from something you want. Shame is when you turn your head away from something you do not want.

Sometimes I looked at them and sometimes they looked at me, but rarely did we look at one another.

People get sick from ''not wanting to see''.

Under the attentiveness was fear, and something else. Anger, hate—the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth.

She examined his face in that special detached way that all women seem to have at times, looking at your face as if it was not part of you, but something you were showing them, like a picture or a piece of china. Then she nodded wisely at it.

He walked down, for a long while avoiding looking at her as at the sun, but seeing her, as one does the sun, without looking.