Quote collection
254 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands — and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference."
"Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together."
"Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery."
"She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all."
"Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed."
"Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress."
"She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?"
"They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything."
"It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now"
"Staunch & faithful little lovers that they are, they give back a hundred fold every sign of love one ever gives them — & it mitigates the pang of losing them to know how very happy a little affection has made them ."
"To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want."
"But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer"
"Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation."
"In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers."
"It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them."
"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them."
"She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability."
"Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression."
"I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction."