Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Vintage International)

Inexorable in its sad reiterations, in its remorseless development, that music wailed and grew in its lamentation in my own heart; heavy it was, and without hope; heavy as those still, leaden clouds that hung motionless in heaven. No relief came to this sorrowing melody—rather a sharper note of anguish; and then for a moment, as if to embitter bitt

deeper down in the more secret chambers of his unsuspecting soul, the smiling Lucy, now as dead and ashy pale, was being bound a ransom for Isabel's salvation.

All children want to be ordinary, and she never was, and that had been difficult – but all adults want to be extraordinary, and now she amplifies her strangeness, delighting in her ignorance of worldly matters and her tendency to speak sometimes in a biblical cadence, telling men she meets that she was born in 1887 (this being the year they dug Bet

What devouring kind of toil could have so shriveled him? What devouring passions had darkened that bulbous countenance, which would have seemed outrageous as a caricature? What had he been?