Top 180 Kate Chopin Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “The soul of her youth clamored for its rights; for a share in the world’s glory and exultation.”

— Kate Chopin

152. “A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most forcibly was their entire absence of prudery.”

— Kate Chopin

153. “His manner invited easy confidence. The preliminary stage of becoming acquainted was one which he always endeavored to ignore when a pretty and engaging woman was concerned.”

— Kate Chopin

Featured in: Romance Quotes

154. “But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing.”

— Kate Chopin

155. “The moments glided on, while a feeling of good fellowship passed around the circle like a mystic cord, holding and binding these people together with jest and laughter.”

— Kate Chopin

156. “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

157. “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

158. “I wonder if any night on earth will be like this one. It is like a night in a dream. The people about me are like some uncanny, half-human beings. There must be spirits abroad tonight.”

— Kate Chopin

159. “Hope follows on the heels of Faith. And the white-winged goddess – which is Hope – did not leave her, but prompted her to many little surreptitious acts of preparation in the event of the miracle coming to pass.”

— Kate Chopin

160. “It seemed to be a law of society that hair must be parted and brushed.”

— Kate Chopin

161. “When Edna was at last alone, she breathed a big, genuine sigh of relief.”

— Kate Chopin

162. “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. ‘The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”

— Kate Chopin

163. “What embraces, in which the lilacs were crushed between them! What ardent kisses! What pink flushes of happiness mounting the cheeks of the two women!”

— Kate Chopin

164. “The voice of the sea is seductive. – Kate Chopin, The Awakening.”

— Kate Chopin

165. “Now there was left with him, at least, a philosophic acquiescence to the existing order – only a desire to be permitted to exist, with now and then a little whiff of genuine life, such as he was breathing now.”

— Kate Chopin

166. “There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature.”

— Kate Chopin

167. “He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing.”

— Kate Chopin

168. “A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime...”

— Kate Chopin

169. “The privilege of quitting their society when they ceased to be entertaining.”

— Kate Chopin

170. “The persistence of the infatuation lent it an aspect of genuineness. The hopelessness of it colored it with the lofty tones of a great passion.”

— Kate Chopin

171. “Not before? – not to-night or to-morrow morning or to-morrow noon or night? or the day after morning or noon? Can’t you see yourself, without my telling you, what an eternity it is?”

— Kate Chopin

172. “Edna was a little miss, just merging into her teens; and the realization that she herself was nothing, nothing, nothing to the engaged young man was a bitter affliction to her.”

— Kate Chopin

173. “There would be no one there to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistance with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”

— Kate Chopin

174. “I shall die. I must die. I cannot be so unhappy, and live.”

— Kate Chopin

175. “An alienated perspective is valuable in fiction because it establishes a new vision of a world we take to be solid and familiar.”

— Kate Chopin

176. “It seems to me the utmost folly for a woman at the head of a household, and the mother of children, to spend in an atelier days which would be better employed contriving for the comfort of her family.”

— Kate Chopin

177. “Southern writers have always treated society more as an organism, less as a mechanism, than have Northern writers. That is, Southern writers have viewed society as a repository of experience and wisdom, however dark, rather than as a system of accommodation among individuals, always subject to reform.”

— Kate Chopin

178. “He looks into the faces of people who pass us by. He tells me that in their eyes he reads the story of their souls.”

— Kate Chopin

179. “Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the little glittering circlet. In a sweeping passion she seized a glass vase from the table and flung it upon the tiles of the hearth. She wanted to destroy something. The crash and clatter were what she wanted to hear.”

— Kate Chopin

180. “The voice of the sea is seductive...”

— Kate Chopin

181. “The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontellier’s eyes that the damp sleeve of her peignoir no longer served to dry them. She was holding the back of her chair with one hand; her loose sleeve had slipped almost to the shoulder of her uplifted arm. Turning, she thrust her face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms. She could not have told why she was crying.”

— Kate Chopin

182. “One of these days,” she said, “I am 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.”

— Kate Chopin

183. “When life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling toward inevitable annihilation.”

— Kate Chopin

184. “Turning, she thrust her face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms. She could not have told why she was crying. Such experiences as the foregoing were not uncommon in her married life. They seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband’s kindness and a uniform devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood.”

— Kate Chopin

185. “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”

— Kate Chopin

186. “Edna looked down at Mademoiselle Reisz and wondered how she could have listened to her venom so long.”

— Kate Chopin

187. “I suppose this is what you would call unwomanly; but I have got into a habit of expressing myself. It doesn’t matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if you like.”

— Kate Chopin

188. “A thousand emotions have swept through me to-night. I don’t comprehend half of them.”

— Kate Chopin