How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
As though, Byron thought, the entire affair had been a lot of people performing a play and that now and at last they had all played out the parts which had been allotted them and now they could live quietly with one another. (3.20)
Byron notes that there is some level of artificiality in all the gossip; it's almost as if people get used to playing a certain role (i.e., disliking someone) and then they get trapped in that role forever.
Quote #5
The town had had the habit of saying things about the disgraced minister which they did not believe themselves for too long a time to break themselves of it. "Because always," he thinks, "when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact." (3.22)
The town clings to ideas of Hightower that they may not believe, only because they're convenient and because, well, they've been around for a while.
Quote #6
Among them the casual Yankees and the poor whites and even the southerners who had lived for a while in the north, who believed aloud that it was an anonymous n***o crime committed not by a n***o but by N***o and who knew, believed, and hoped that she had been ravished too: at least once before her throat was cut and at least once afterward. (13.1)
As the town looks at the burning house, they're less concerned with the fact of Miss Burden's death than they are hopeful that she's been raped – the novel seems cynical about the town's capacity for sympathy here.