You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they’re not.

The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.

After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married.

That must be why the animals that lived in swamps were built the way they were, Nick thought.

It was just beginning to be daylight when they walked along the logging road back toward the lake.

Nick’s father ordered some water to be put on the stove, and while it was heating he spoke to Nick.

I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back.

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine gun fire in the street.

They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained.

They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away.

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air.

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

He waited a moment longer, hoping I’d begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home.

I could only get as far as “On earth as it is in heaven” and then have to start all over and be absolutely unable to get past that.

In the afternoon, after the sun had crossed toward the hills, the trout would be in the cool shadows on the other side of the stream.

It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people.

“Yes. Your father has felt for some time that you should be able to take the car out in the evenings whenever you wished but we only talked it over last night.”

No, the fallow squares of earth will be most frequent⁠—they’ll be along beside the track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive, mechanical, abominable.

He’d be reading the Paris-Sport and he’d look over at me and say, “Where’s your girl, Joe?” to kid me on account I had told him about the girl that day at the next table.

When she looked at them they didn’t seem to be moving at all but if she went in and dried some more dishes and then came out again they would be out of sight beyond the point.

They were tired of Dijon and anyway would now be able to say that after leaving Harvard or Columbia or Wabash, they had studied at the University of Dijon, down in the Côte d’Or.

In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water, in the half light, the fishing would be tragic.

She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring.

They are not perfect ovals⁠—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end⁠—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead.

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.