Kate Chopin
Author
1850-02-08
Quotes by Kate Chopin
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The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
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...when I left her to-day, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said. 'The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.'
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She had resolved to never take another step backward.
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She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They seemed never 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 indescriptible 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.
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Mrs.Pontellier was not a woman given to confidences, a chararacteristic 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 aprehended instinctively the dual life, that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.
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Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an apalling and hopeless ennui. 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. Edna vaguely wondered what she meant by life's delirium. It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression.
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The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies
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It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
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It seems to me if I were young and in love I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion.
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So does he live, seeking, finding, joying and suffering.
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Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.
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Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse.
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Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her. Good-by--because I love you. He did not know; he did not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him--but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone.She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.
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She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in.
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What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being! Free! Body and soul free! She kept whispering.
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She was still under the spell of her infatuation. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering. But the thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.
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The morning was full of sunlight and hope.
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...when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life's mystery.
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There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips.
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The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.
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