Top 100 Kate Chopin Quotes
#1. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it? He himself had his hands full with his brokerage business.
Kate Chopin
#2. Mrs. Pontellier gave over being astonished, and concluded that wonders would never cease.
Kate Chopin
#3. What shall we do there?" "Climb up the hill to the old fort and look at the little wriggling gold snakes, and watch the lizards sun themselves.
Kate Chopin
#4. 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
#5. Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace.
Kate Chopin
#6. She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so, - to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Kate Chopin
#7. 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.
Kate Chopin
#8. There are periods of despondency and suffering which take possession of me. But I don't want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others-
Kate Chopin
#9. Her marriage to Leonce Pontellier was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate.
Kate Chopin
#10. The peace and beauty of a spring day had descended upon the earth like a benediction.
Kate Chopin
#11. The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the water oaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet. Their heads might have been turned upside down, so absolutely did they tread upon blue ether.
Kate Chopin
#12. The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days.
Kate Chopin
#13. There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.
Kate Chopin
#14. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex.
Kate Chopin
#15. There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
Kate Chopin
#18. I trust it will not be giving away professional secrets to say that many readers would be surprised, perhaps shocked, at the questions which some newspaper editors will put to a defenseless woman under the guise of flattery.
Kate Chopin
#19. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in.
Kate Chopin
#20. The Ratignolles understood each other perfectly. If ever the fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union.
Kate Chopin
#21. Par exemple! I never had to ask. You were always there under my feet, like a troublesome cat." "You mean like an adoring dog. And just as soon as Ratignolle appeared on the scene, then it WAS like a dog. 'Passez! Adieu! Allez vous-en!
Kate Chopin
#22. There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.
Kate Chopin
#23. The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies
Kate Chopin
#24. Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love.
Kate Chopin
#25. Don't stir all the warmth out of your coffee; drink it.
Kate Chopin
#26. 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.
Kate Chopin
#27. Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.
Kate Chopin
#28. Edna looked straight before her with a self-absorbed expression upon her face. She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vender, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic.
Kate Chopin
#29. Daisies, just starting to close their petals, littered the grass like fallen stars.
Kate Chopin
#30. Discover her appetite, and to see the relish with which she ate the
Kate Chopin
#31. The stillest hour of the night had come, the hour before dawn, when the world seems to hold its breath. The moon hung low, and had turned from silver to copper in the sleeping sky.
Kate Chopin
#33. I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not.
Kate Chopin
#34. Youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.
Kate Chopin
#35. I don't want to part in any ill-humor. But can't you understand? I've grown used to seeing you, to having you with me all the time, and your action seems unfriendly, even unkind. You don't even offer an excuse for it. Why, I was planning to be together.
Kate Chopin
#36. I have said it before, but I don't think I have ever came so near meaning it.
Kate Chopin
#37. She was fond of her children in an uneven, impulsive way. She would sometimes gather them passionately to her heart; she would sometimes forget them.
Kate Chopin
#38. Or else she stayed in and nursed a mood with which she was becoming too familiar for her own comfort and peace of mind. It was not despair; but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promise broken and unfulfilled.
Kate Chopin
#39. How long will you be gone?"
"Forever, perhaps. I don't know. It depends upon a good many things.
Kate Chopin
#40. There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.
Kate Chopin
#41. [ ... ] the beginning of things, of a world especially is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.
Kate Chopin
#42. She had tried to forget him, realizing the inutility of remembering.
Kate Chopin
#43. But she laughed and looked at him with eyes that at once gave him courage to wait and made it torture to wait.
Kate Chopin
#44. She wanted to destroy something. The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear.
Kate Chopin
#45. One must possess many gifts ... which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover ... the artist must possess the courageous soul.
Kate Chopin
#46. The city atmosphere certainly has improved her. Some way she doesn't seem like the same woman.
Kate Chopin
#47. She was growing accustomed to like shocks, but she could not keep the mounting color back from her cheeks.
Kate Chopin
#48. But whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.
Kate Chopin
#49. It is greater than the stars - that moving procession of human energy; greater than the palpitating earth and the things growing thereon.
Kate Chopin
#50. She was flushed and felt intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor. It muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom.
Kate Chopin
#51. Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse.
Kate Chopin
#52. A person can't have everything in this world; and it was a little unreasonable of her to expect it.
Kate Chopin
#53. The eyes alone in the baby suggested the man. And
Kate Chopin
#54. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled, down, down to the water
Kate Chopin
#55. You are the embodiment of selfishness.
Kate Chopin
#56. And moreover, to succeed, the artist must possess the courageous soul ... the brave soul. The soul that dares and defies.
Kate Chopin
#57. 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
#58. I love you. Good-by--because I love you.
Kate Chopin
#59. She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women.
Kate Chopin
#60. It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire.
Kate Chopin
#61. Don't go; don't go! Oh! Edna, stay with me.
Kate Chopin
#62. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,
when it did not seem worthwhile to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.
Kate Chopin
#63. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day.
Kate Chopin
#64. Well, for instance, when I left her today, she put her arms around me and felt my shoulder blades, to see if my wings were strong, she said.
Kate Chopin
#65. So the storm passed and every one was happy.
Kate Chopin
#66. She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
Kate Chopin
#67. She would, through habit, have yielded to his desire; not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly, as we walk, move, sit, stand, go through the daily treadmill of the life which has been portioned out to us.
Kate Chopin
#68. The delicious breath of rain was in the air.
Kate Chopin
#69. She answered her husband with friendly evasiveness - not with any fixed design to mislead him, only because all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.
Kate Chopin
#70. A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, - the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
Kate Chopin
#71. We shall be everything to each other. Nothing else shall be of any consequence.
Kate Chopin
#72. One who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul
Kate Chopin
#74. A general air of surprise and genuine satisfaction fell upon everyone as they saw the pianist enter.
Kate Chopin
#75. An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.
Kate Chopin
#76. Don't part from me in any ill humor. I never knew you to be out of patience with me before.
Kate Chopin
#77. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself [ ... ].
Kate Chopin
#78. She wanted something to happen - something, anything: she did not know what.
Kate Chopin
#79. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.
Kate Chopin
#80. A vision of the future like some dim, gaunt monster sometimes appalled her, but luckily to-morrow never comes. Mrs.
Kate Chopin
#81. The flowers were like new acquaintances; she approached them in a familiar spirit, and made herself at home among them.
Kate Chopin
#83. And the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew of none better.
Kate Chopin
#84. She grew fond of her husband, realizing with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection, thereby threatening its dissolution.
Kate Chopin
#85. Even as a child she had lived her own small life 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
#86. Great matter to have one's hand kissed. She was provoked at his having written the apology. She answered in as light and bantering a spirit as she fancied it deserved, and
Kate Chopin
#87. She was always talking about her "condition." Her "condition" was in no way apparent, and no one would have known a thing about it but for her persistence in making it the subject of conversation.
Kate Chopin
#88. He was always intending to go to Mexico, but some way never got there. Meanwhile he held on to his modest position in a mercantile house in New Orleans, where an equal familiarity with English, French and Spanish gave him no small value as a clerk and correspondent.
Kate Chopin
#89. The way to become rich is to make money, my dear Edna, not to save it, he said.
Kate Chopin
#90. She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
Kate Chopin
#91. Feeling secure regarding their happiness and welfare, she did not miss them except with an occasional, intense longing.
Kate Chopin
#92. I love you, only you; no one but you. It was you who awoke me last summer out of a life-long, stupid dream.
Kate Chopin
#93. I leave such ventures ti you younger men with the fever of life still in your blood.
Kate Chopin
#94. It is bizarre to treat all differences as oppositions,
Kate Chopin
#95. She was moved by a kind of commiseration ... 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.
Kate Chopin
#96. The soul of her youth clamored for its rights; for a share in the world's glory and exultation.
Kate Chopin
#97. Pirate gold isn't a thing to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the golden specks fly.
Kate Chopin
#98. His manner invited easy confidence. The preliminary stage of becoming acquainted was one which he always endeavored to ignore when a pretty and engaging woman was concerned.
Kate Chopin
#99. I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.
Kate Chopin
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