How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"[…] The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!" She lifted her hands to her face, and he saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob. (9.63)
Madame Olenska is overwhelmed by society's insistence that she constantly pretend to be pleasant.
Quote #2
His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make— even to the point of calling him original. (10.17)
Archer is pained by his own cliché behavior, by May's cliché behavior, and by the cliché of being a young man already annoyed by his fiancée.
Quote #3
He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
"Sameness— sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting tune […] (10.30-3)
Can you imagine doing the same thing over and over again day after day? It would be like eating a chicken Caesar salad for every single meal. No wonder Archer's miserable.
Quote #4
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future. (15.60)
The "usual" is felt to be a kind of horrible death, killing off everything that's lively and passionate and spontaneous. Also, cinders taste terrible.
Quote #5
The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable. It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever lift that load from his heart. (18.79)
Yet another instance where Archer sees his future as a slow process of dying. A fun thing to do would be to use this quote in a graduation speech. Just kidding: that would be the least fun thing in the world.
Quote #6
The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody ever understood […] Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance. (19.14)
Archer's passion for Madame Olenska is the only thing he feels is "real." Everything else seems artificial and ridiculous. We get it. What kind of silverware you set out for dinner is a pretty dull preoccupation.
Quote #7
Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. (20.49)
May is the voice of society in their marriage, reminding him what society thinks is acceptable and what society thinks is "vulgar." She's like a mental policewoman.
Quote #8
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. (22.36)
Add this quote to the list of quotes where Archer views his future with hopelessness and despair. Don't be like Archer, kids.
Quote #9
"Catch my death!" he echoed; and he felt like adding: "But I've caught it already. I am dead —I've been dead for months and months." (30.21)
It's ironic that May worries about Newland catching his death of cold when she is partly, or even primarily, responsible for his figurative "death," in the sense that she has prevented Newland from pursuing his love for Madame Olenska.
Quote #10
Looking about him, he honored his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways. (34.12)
Archer thirty years later hasn't turned out as bitter as the previous pages might have led you to believe. Despite all his moaning about how the future is just a slow death, he seems to have found some happiness anyway.