I wonder if any night on earth will be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad tonight.

— Kate Chopin

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

— Kate Chopin

Mrs. Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences, a characteristic hitherto contrary to her nature. Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life, that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.

— Kate Chopin

She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They never seemed before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband’s kindness and a uniform devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood. An indestructible oppression which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood. She did not sit there inwardly upbraiding her husband, lamenting at Fate, which had directed her footsteps to the path which they had taken. She was just having a good cry all to herself.

— Kate Chopin

She felt like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry for the kiss which they invited.

— Kate Chopin

She felt that her speech was voicing the incoherence her thoughts, and stopped abruptly.

— Kate Chopin

She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves… They belonged to her and were her own, and she entertained the conviction that she had a right to them and they concerned no one but herself.

— Kate Chopin

She had resolved to never take another step backward.

— Kate Chopin

She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in.

— Kate Chopin

She perceived that her will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant. She could not at that moment have done other than denied and resisted. Furthermore, she wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before. And if she had submitted to his command. Of course, she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.

— Kate Chopin