|
860e60d
|
He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
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|
in-his-arms
the-age-of-innocence
|
Edith Wharton |
|
aefd973
|
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.
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|
solitude
unreality
|
Edith Wharton |
|
a81ee66
|
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
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|
solitude
the-house-of-mirth
|
Edith Wharton |
|
d823ee0
|
They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.
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|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
c219323
|
Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!
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|
pulitzer-prize
social-criticism
hypocrisy
new-york
|
Edith wharton |
|
e3ffc28
|
Marriage is one long sacrifice.
|
|
unhappiness
sacrifice
|
Edith Wharton |
|
ac7d861
|
The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay.
|
|
self-awareness
maturing
|
Edith Wharton |
|
ddf6d7e
|
A smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.
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|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
9e37376
|
As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep
|
|
marriage
|
Edith Wharton |
|
63dc934
|
Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
|
|
success
|
Edith Wharton |
|
a1cacf6
|
We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.
|
|
women
edith-wharton
the-house-of-mirth
fashion
|
Edith Wharton |
|
eca869a
|
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.
|
|
false-modesty
|
Edith Wharton |
|
d61c5d9
|
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
8fd2655
|
She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
1c75835
|
he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
780c541
|
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
85343ee
|
A woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself
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|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
ac09a71
|
She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
b6db7df
|
We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
0f62f3a
|
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.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
3e686ad
|
She had given him all she had - but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough; it could not buy more than a few moments...
|
|
other-girls
|
Edith Wharton |
|
5e9bbcb
|
You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
e5fe81a
|
The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic
|
|
pain
reality
|
Edith Wharton |
|
b28d6da
|
B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
c96b8f8
|
The change will do you good," she said simply, when he had finished; "and you must be sure to go and see Ellen," she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty. It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in the code in which they had both been trained it meant: "Of course you understand that I ..
|
|
20th-century-literature
awesome-things
|
Edith Wharton |
|
4df29c6
|
Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
2c2c976
|
Selden] had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once fl..
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
2b98bae
|
but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
c7a443d
|
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.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
b726e67
|
It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big reverberating station. As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cro..
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
afa1ce4
|
The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
0af8f60
|
She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
3f52e1e
|
It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman's eyes, and bid her look forth upon the world. But how many generations of the women of had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when..
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
f63e8b3
|
it is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
41938c8
|
What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
f811071
|
Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
445996d
|
It was before him again in its completeness--the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
1a30f6a
|
The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches
|
|
mind
inspirational
ethan-frome
|
Edith Wharton |
|
49426dc
|
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
|
|
laugh
fat
|
Edith Wharton |
|
85faefb
|
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?"
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
293c37b
|
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?" --
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
15626ee
|
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a sufficient condemnation of society to find one's self accepting such phraseology?
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
53511f5
|
Absent- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |
|
49efa86
|
She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability.
|
|
|
Edith Wharton |