In the Closed Room Quotes

“A large house left deserted by those who have filled its rooms with emotions and life, expresses a silence, a quality all its own. A house unfurnished and empty seems less impressively silent. The fact of its devoidness of sound is upon the whole more natural. But carpets accustomed to the pressure of constantly passing feet, chairs and sofas which have held human warmth, draperies used to the touch of hands drawing them aside to let in daylight, pictures which have smiled back at thinking eyes, mirrors which have reflected faces passing hourly in changing moods, elate or dark or longing, walls which have echoed back voices—all these things when left alone seem to be held in strange arrest, as if by some spell intensifying the effect of the pause in their existence.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“It was a vague belief that she herself was not quite real—or that she did not belong to the life she had been born into.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“She had been a smart, lovely, laughing and lovable thing, full of pleasure in the world, and now she was so stricken and devastated that she seemed set apart in an awful lonely world of her own.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“She knew now why she had come up here. It was so that she might feel like this—as if she was upheld far away from things—as if she had left everything behind—almost as if she had fallen awake again. There was no perfume in the air, but all was still and sweet and clear.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“So taking it, she stood among the dried, withered things and looked in tender regret at them.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“her chest began to rise and fall with a quickening of her breath, and her breath quickened because her heart fluttered—as if with her haste.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“The stillness seemed to hold her and she paused to hear and feel it.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“And as she lay and listened, it was as if she were not only listening but waiting for something. She did not know at all what she was waiting for, but waiting she was.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“She lay and listened to the quietness.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“Perhaps when her eyes closed the sultriness of the night had changed to the momentary freshness of the turning dawn,”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room

“She herself could not have explained the reasons for her silence;”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, In the Closed Room