10
" Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelist, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Burst of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jest together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and make it all up again with the conventional fitness of things. "
― William Dean Howells , The Rise of Silas Lapham
20
" The stranger looked at his watch; he jumped to his feet. "Nine o'clock! Mrs. Braile, I'm ashamed. But you must blame your husband, partly. Good night, ma'am; good—Why, look here, Squire Braile!" he arrested himself in offering his hand. "How about the obscurity of the scene where Joe Smith founded his superstition, which bids fair to live right along with the other false religions? Was Leatherwood, Ohio, a narrower stage than Manchester, New York? And in point of time the two cults were only four years apart. "
― William Dean Howells , The Leatherwood God
