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The past was nothing to her offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was significant.

Kate Chopin

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Kate Chopin
Age: 54 †
Born: 1850
Born: February 8
Died: 1904
Died: August 22
Author
Novelist
Translator
Writer
St. Louis
Missouri
Katherine O'Flaherty
Mystery
Attempted
Present
Heed
Willing
Penetrate
Alone
Awakening
Future
Offered
Past
Lesson
Nothing
Significant
Never
Lessons

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I'm tired, she uttered complainingly. I know you are. You don't know anything about it. Why should you know? I never was so exhausted in my life. But it isn't unpleasant. A thousand emotions have swept through me to-night. I don't comprehend half on them. Don't mind what I'm saying I am just thinking aloud.
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There are some people who leave impressions not so lasting as the imprint of an oar upon the water.
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The way to become rich is to make money, not to save it.
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I would give up the unessential I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children but I wouldnt give myself. I can't make it more clear it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.
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It was not despair, but it seemed to her as if life were passing by, leaving its promises broken and unfulfilled. Yet there were other days when she listened, was led on and deceived by fresh promises which her youth had held out to her.
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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.
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It was still quite light out of doors, but inside with the curtains drawn and the smouldering fire sending out a dim, uncertain glow, the room was full of deep shadows.
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I would give up my life for my children, but not myself.
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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?'
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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.
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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.
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She's got some sort of notion in her head concerning the eternal rights of women.
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Does he write to you? Never a line. Does he send you a message? Never a word. It is because he loves you, poor fool, and is trying to forget you, since you are not free to listen to him or to belong to him.
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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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The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.
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To be an artist includes much one must possess many gifts - absolute gifts - which have not been acquired by one's own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul.
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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?
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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.
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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!
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but whatever came, she had resolved never again to belong to another than herself.
Kate Chopin