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f85fe9a
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She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.
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Edith Wharton |
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b987bd4
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I can't love you unless I give you up.
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Edith Wharton |
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1eec8ea
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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.
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edith wharton |
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bd11d5f
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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
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Edith Wharton |
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94b522e
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Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.' Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.
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Edith Wharton |
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0224fe9
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He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.
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Edith Wharton |
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57b4475
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He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as ..
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Edith Wharton |
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57cf23c
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There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
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Edith Wharton |
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d528519
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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. "
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Edith Wharton |
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f2426ef
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She had been bored all afternoon by Percy Gryce... but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptibilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life.
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Edith Wharton |
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e4908f1
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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.
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Edith Wharton |
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439addc
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They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
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Edith Wharton |
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072aa30
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The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder--the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?
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Edith Wharton |
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9d69133
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And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..." --
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Edith Wharton |
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097a24e
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The only way to not think about money is to have a great deal of it." You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe."
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Edith Wharton |
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3d70573
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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.
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Edith Wharton |
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2047841
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Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.
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luxury
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Edith Wharton |
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437f733
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Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.
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Edith Wharton |
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1410c25
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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.
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Edith Wharton |
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200bd5e
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He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.
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Edith Wharton |
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c90d90b
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Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
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Edith Wharton |
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0f2c34d
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And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.
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Edith Wharton |
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baa450f
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It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.
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amusement
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Edith Wharton |
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21a2010
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The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosohpically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink..
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Edith Wharton |
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7e4740d
|
Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
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sad
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Edith Wharton |
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d49ca18
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It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
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old-world
copy
stupid
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Edith Wharton |
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c99d894
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She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all.
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Edith Wharton |
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d22ee35
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No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity
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Edith Wharton |
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28bb1c4
|
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.
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love
sensuality
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Edith Wharton |
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fa3d69b
|
How I hate everything!
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Edith Wharton |
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5bf4845
|
I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary.
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love
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Edith Wharton |
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e50d80a
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One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace
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Edith Wharton |
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3dc31a8
|
Isn't it natural that I should belittle all the things I can't offer you?
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Edith Wharton |
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646ac94
|
She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all."
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reality
love
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Edith Wharton |
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c6ba9f2
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But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.
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Edith Wharton |
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9f510e4
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He had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against famil..
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Edith Wharton |
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531509d
|
I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!
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life-and-living
rubbish-heap
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Edith Wharton |
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a11f6c7
|
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
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Edith Wharton |
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c007620
|
Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.
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Edith Wharton |
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fa61449
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He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.
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seldon
lily-bart
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Edith Wharton |
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3c11a8d
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True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.
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Edith Wharton |
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755c148
|
and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
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Edith Wharton |
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0d634d2
|
It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters... any more than these little things that used to be necessary and important to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying glass and labelled: 'Use unknown.'" "Yes, but meanwhile -" "Ah, meanwhile -"
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Edith Wharton |
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e9ac434
|
They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars
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Edith Wharton |