Looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage. - Kate Chopin

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 impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.

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 anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium.

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