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“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. ”

"It was as if he were a dead man animated by nothing more than a habit of stubborn will. Yet he was oddly aware of himself and of the places, persons, and events which moved past him in these few days; and he knew that he presented to the public regard an appearance which belied his condition. He taught his classes, he greeted his colleagues, he attended the meetings he had to attend--and no one of the people he met from day to day knew that anything was wrong.

But from the moment he walked out of Gordon Finch's office, he knew, somewhere within the numbness that grew from a small center of his being, that a part of his life was over, that a part of him was so near death that he could watch the approach almost with calm. He was vaguely conscious that he walked across the campus in the bright crisp heat of an early spring afternoon; the dogwood trees along the sidewalks and in the front yards were in full bloom, and they trembled like soft clouds, translucent and tenuous, before his gaze; the sweet scent of dying lilac blossoms drenched the air."

"In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another."

“During that year, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”

“He had never got in the habit of introspection, and he found the task of searching his motives a difficult and slightly distasteful one; he felt that he had little to offer to himself and that there was little within him which he could find.”

"The house was quiet; even the piano was unused, so that dust gathered on the keyboard. They had come to that point in their life together when they seldom spoke of themselves or each other, lest the delicate balance that made their living together possible be broken. So it was only after long hesitation and deliberation about consequences that Stoner finally asked her if anything was wrong."