After he became used to his anger Stoner found a reluctant and perverse admiration stealing over him. However florid and imprecise, the man‘s powers of rhetoric and invention were dismayingly impressive; and however grotesque, his presence was real. There was something cold and calculating and watchful in his eyes, something needlessly reckless and yet desperately cautious. Stoner became aware that he was in the presence of a bluff so colossal and bold that he had no ready means of dealing with it. - P146
And then she smiled. It was a slow smile that started in her eyes and pulled at her lips until her face was wreathed in radiant, secret, and intimate delight. Stoner almost pulled back from the sudden and involuntary warmth. - P148
Stoner felt lifted from him a burden of regret and worry that he had not known he carried; the relief was almost physical, and he felt light on his feet and a little giddy. He laughed. - P148
The smile eased itself off her face, and she looked at him gravely for a moment more. Then she bobbed her head,
turned away from him, and walked swiftly down the hall.
Her body was slim and straight, and she carried herself unobtrusively. Stoner stood looking down the hall for several moments after she disappeared. Then he sighed and went back into the room where Walker waited. - P148
As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study.
As he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear, the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture—as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible. - P103
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