The Awakening and Selected Stories Quotes

“The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“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, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“The trouble is," sighed the Doctor, grasping her meaning intuitively, "that 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, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“Do you suppose a woman knows why she loves? Does she select? Does she say to herself, 'Go to! here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.' or, 'I shall set my heart upon this musician, whose fame is on every tongue?' or 'this financier, who controls the world's money markets?”
― Chopin, Kate, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“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 may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight—perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening & Other Short Stories

“Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul. The physical need for sleep began to overtake her; the exuberance which had sustained and exalted her spirit left her helpless and yielding to the conditions which crowded her in.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening & Other Short Stories

“I've been working like a machine, and feeling like a lost soul.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing; because he has two lips and a square chin, and a little finger which he can't straighten from having played baseball too energetically in his youth.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening & Other Short Stories Illustrated

“The bird that would soar about the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“One of these days," she said, "I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think--try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening & Other Short Stories

“Robert's going had some way taken the brightness, the color, the meaning, out of everything. The conditions of her life were in no way changed, but her whole existence was dulled, like a faded garment which seems to be no longer worth wearing.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening & Other Short Stories

“The children were sent to bed. Some went submissively; others with shrieks and protests as they were dragged away. They had been permitted to sit up till after the ice-cream, which naturally marked the limit of human indulgence. ”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“She began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why,—when it did not seem worth while 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. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“However, I don't mind walking. I always feel so sorry for women who don't like to walk; they miss so much—so many rare little glimpses of life; and we women learn so little of life on the whole.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“One of these days," she said, "I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think—try to determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don't know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can't convince myself that I am. I must think about it.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“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.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“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.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“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, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“A thousand emotions have swept through me to-night. I don't comprehend half of them.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“Why do you love him when you ought not to?" Edna, with a motion or two, dragged herself on her knees before Mademoiselle Reisz, who took the glowing face between her two hands. "Why? Because his hair is brown and grows away from his temples; because he opens and shuts his eyes, and his nose is a little out of drawing; because he has two lips and a square chin, and a little finger which he can't straighten from having played baseball too energetically in his youth.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories

“I know I shall like it, like the feeling of freedom and independence.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening & Other Short Stories

“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.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,--the light which, showing the way, forbids”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories

“She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories