The best Ethan Frome quotes

Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.

I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome

He knew that most young men made nothing at all of giving a pretty girl a kiss, and he remembered that the night before, when he had put his arm about Mattie, she had not resisted. But that had been out-of-doors, under the open irresponsible night. Now, in the warm lamplit room, with all its ancient implications of conformity and order, she seemed infinitely farther away from him and more unapproachable.

I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two.

At other times her silence seemed deliberately assumed to conceal far-reaching intentions, mysterious conclusions drawn from suspicions and resentments impossible to guess.

Though she was but seven years her husband's senior, and he was only twenty-eight, she was already an old woman.

They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars.

She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.

I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.