Quote collection
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will."
"In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation."
"There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you."
"[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally."
"Do you know-I hardly remembered you? Hardly remembered me? I mean: how shall I explain? I-it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again."
"Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words."
"..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune."
"It was amusement enough to be with a group of fearless and talkative girls, who said new things in a new language, who were ignorant of tradition and unimpressed by distinctions of rank; but it was soon clear that their young hostesses must be treated with the same respect, if not with the same ceremony as English girls of good family."
"Her failure was a useful preliminary to success."
"It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all."
"The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading."
"One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful."
"The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost."
"Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me."
"I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable."
"She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life."
"You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute."
"There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free."
"He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty."
"And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."