Status Updates From The Awakening

"'Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it.' The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave."

"The story did not seem especially to impress Edna. She had one of her own to tell, of a woman who paddled away with her lover one night in a pirogue and never came back...It was a pure invention. She said that Madame Antoine had related it to her. That, also, was an invention. Perhaps it was a dream she had had."

"Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one."

"I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, 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 never was so exhausted in my life. But it isn't unpleasant. A thousand emotions have swept through me tonight. I don't comprehend half of them. Don't mind what I'm, saying; I am just thinking aloud. I wonder if I shall ever be stirred again as Mademoiselle Reisz's playing moved me tonight. I wonder if any night on earth will ever again be like this one. It is like a night in a dream."

"In short, Mrs Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her."

This is one of those books where the vaguely ill feeling it elicits lasts longer than any clear remembrance of the plot. It’s so languid, like the sea, “whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.”