"There were rooms and costumes which appeared to be made to lure but which were actually effective means to create distance."
"The only words which opened her being were the muffled words of poets so rarely uttered by human beings. They alone penetrated her without awakening the bristling guards on watch at the gateways, costumed like silver porcupines armed with mistrust, barring the way to the secret recesses of her thoughts and feelings."
"fluent waist"
"rhetorical feet"
"eloquent with her body."
"tender inflections of the voice without malice or mockery"
"She never knew whether two people woven together by feelings answering each other as echoes threw off a phosphorescence, the chemical sparks of marriage, or whether each one threw upon the other the spotlight of his inner dream."
"Strange scenes took place between them. She subdued her intelligence and became passive to please him. But it was a game and they both knew it. Her ebullience broke through all her pretenses at quietism."
"No sadness could resist this frenzied carnival of affection he dispensed every day, beginning with his enthusiasm for his first cup of coffee, joy at the day's beginning, an immediate fancy for the first person he saw, a passion at the least provocation for man, woman, child, or animal. A warmth even in his collisions with misfortunes, troubles and difficulties.
He received them smiling. Without money in his pocket he rushed to help. With generous excess he rushed to love, to desire, to possess, to lose, to suffer, to die the multiple little deaths everyone dies each day. He would even die and weep and suffer and lose with enthusiasm, with ardor. He was prodigal in poverty, rich and abundant in some invisible chemical equivalent to gold and sun."
"His joy was in movement, in assenting, in consenting, in expansion."
