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02c107d
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There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it.
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hope
love
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Edith Wharton |
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b3d5e39
|
It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised.
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Edith Wharton |
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bdb994c
|
Xingu!" she scoffed. "Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did--unprepared though we were--that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!"
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humor
dangerous-philosophy
didacticism
pretension
manners
puns
new-york
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Edith Wharton |
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fe16834
|
She drew herself up to the full height of her slender majesty, towering like some dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty, who could only falter out: "Lily, Lily-- how can you laugh about such things?" "So as not to weep, perhaps. But no-- I'm not of the tearful order. I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes."
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Edith Wharton |
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c9cb632
|
Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.
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Edith Wharton |
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eb94cfe
|
Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....
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Edith Wharton |
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6981792
|
How beautiful it was---and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.
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lily-bart
edith-wharton
the-house-of-mirth
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Edith Wharton |
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87b4203
|
Since the fanciful vision of the future that had flitted through her imagination at their first meeting she had hardly ever thought of his marrying her. She had not had to put the thought from her mind; it had not been there. If ever she looked ahead she felt instinctively that the gulf between them was too deep, and that the bridge their passion had flung across it was as insubstantial as a rainbow. But she seldom looked ahead; each day wa..
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Edith Wharton |
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dfc9d4c
|
Even women have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.
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Edith Wharton |
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7443ff4
|
She had once more shown her talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her companion.
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Edith Wharton |
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1a12fa2
|
She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce--the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice--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 adaptabilities, 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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576c193
|
But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect.
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Edith Wharton |
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2e07146
|
Yes: I was down there once, and for a good while afterward I could call up the sight of it in winter. But now it's all snowed under.
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Edith Wharton |
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9571855
|
Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. "He talks every language as well as the rest of us," Susy had once said of him, "but at least he talks one language better than the others."
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Edith Wharton |
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21739ba
|
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 to act which never made for romance. The strident setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little Dabham of the "Riviera Notes," ..
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Edith Wharton |
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bfbf2f6
|
and he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes
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Edith Wharton |
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75db112
|
He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence.
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Edith Wharton |
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3cfd51a
|
Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....
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Edith Wharton |
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252f9f1
|
I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is a hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits . . . and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.
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Edith Wharton |
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7c7d309
|
But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for, deep within us as the ghost instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned, and chopped into little bits, the creative facul..
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Edith Wharton |
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086f924
|
She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.
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Edith Wharton |
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4395d5f
|
but these backwaters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion... ("Afterward")"
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rural-life
rural
countryside
|
Edith Wharton |
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f67d6ea
|
Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.
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Edith Wharton |
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530e7b7
|
All the long misery of his baffled past, of his youth of failure, hardship and vain effort, rose up in his soul in bitterness and seemed to take shape before him in the woman who at every turn had barred his way.
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Edith Wharton |
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c5a711e
|
But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life.
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Edith Wharton |
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5ce6cb1
|
women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men.
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Edith Wharton |
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771edc2
|
Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood.
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Edith Wharton |
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18d815a
|
a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once.
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Edith Wharton |
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a62f3be
|
But they're too shy to speak when my mother-in-law doesn't; sometimes they open their mouths to begin, but they never get as far as the first sentence. You must get used to an ocean of silence, and just swim about in it as well as you can.
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Edith Wharton |
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f290ce9
|
Something in truth lay dead between them--the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.
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Edith Wharton |
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693d18a
|
She is still a bundle of engaging possibilities rather than a finished picture. Of the mother there is nothing to say, for that excellent lady evidently requires familiar surroundings to bring out such small individuality as she possesses. In the unfamiliar she becomes invisible; and Longlands and she will never be visible to each other.
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Edith Wharton |
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aab71d5
|
There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.
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Edith Wharton |
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29d432e
|
Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them--children, duties, visits, bores, relations--the things that protect married people from each other. We've been too close together--that has been our sin. We've seen the nakedness of each other's souls.
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madness
marriage
|
Edith Wharton |
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8900884
|
Honorius Hatchard had been old Miss Hatchard's great-uncle; though she would undoubtedly have reversed the phrase, and put forward, as her only claim to distinction, the fact that she was his great-niece. For Honorius Hatchard, in the early years of the nineteenth century, had enjoyed a modest celebrity. As the marble tablet in the interior of the library informed its infrequent visitors, he had possessed marked literary gifts, written a se..
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Edith Wharton |
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2a2edf0
|
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.
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Edith Wharton |
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8b38a86
|
But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing . . .
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lawrence-selden
lily-bart
the-house-of-mirth
|
Edith Wharton |
|
7d9e957
|
Oh, certainly, 'The Wings of Death' is not amusing," ventured Mrs. Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like that of an obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to submit if his first selection does not suit." --
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Edith Wharton |
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0d8853b
|
Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a bluebottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions wi..
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social-skills
context
observation
|
Edith Wharton |
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018d965
|
After all, marriage is marriage, and money's money--both useful things in their way ...
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Edith Wharton |
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1594c9a
|
But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of rebellion.
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Edith Wharton |
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5596f8b
|
Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: 'Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river'.
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Edith Wharton |
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864166f
|
Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.
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Edith Wharton |
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d6e9d48
|
But there was something more miserable still--it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years.
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Edith Wharton |
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6f496a5
|
His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.
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Edith Wharton |