"Some said that he did not clearly express anything. Some were certain that he expressed something very clearly and some of such of them said that he would have been a greater one if he had not been one so clearly expressing what he was expressing’’
The quote from above appears in the second part of the story entitled "Matisse’’, after the narrator already analyzed the status of the major character, an unnamed man which did something not mentioned here in the story. After the deed was done, the rest of the people around ‘’he’’ started to talk about the man’s actions, thinking about his motives and analyzing weather what he had done was good or bad. The people who do this are not portrayed in a positive manner, but rather portrayed as people who have nothing else better to do than mingle in someone else’s affairs and criticize their every step. Those people were also unwilling to ask the man in question about his motives, thus putting "he’’ in a corner where he became unable to protect himself. This has the purpose of showing just how easy someone can be branded as being good or bad, without being given the opportunity to defend himself against what others were talking about him while also presenting how dangerous this can be, both for the person being criticized and for the people criticizing.
"The story of how she bowed to her brother.
Who has whom as his.’’
This quote appears in the beginning of the story and foreshadows the trajectory the story will take. The story is about the way in which women are subjected to the will of their male relatives and other males around them. The woman in this case, the sister, has no choice in how she wanted to live her life. The brother is the one who has almost complete control over the life of the sister, controlling her almost as if she were an animal. This quote will later be repeated over and over again like a mantra, showing that this practice is hard, almost impossible to eliminate from the modern society.
"When we left Paris we had rain. (…) We did have snow then. Now we are bold. We are accustomed to it.’’
This description appears in the first part and may be an allusion made towards the Second World War which affected France and those living in the country. The rain may be a reference made here towards the minor inconveniences the people had to endure in the beginning of the war while the snow represents the more serious dangers the people had to endure once the war progressed. The narrator implies that these events affected may people in the beginning but them more and more people became accustomed to those events and even embraced them to a point.
