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cb19bf6
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They had paused before the table on which the bride's jewel were displayed, and Lily's heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces - the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting. The g..
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wealth
weddings
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Edith Wharton |
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c988e4a
|
But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate.
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Edith Wharton |
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ea6460c
|
Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.
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Edith Wharton |
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01866bd
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He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment.
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Edith Wharton |
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4983654
|
Once--twice--you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake--I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me--I understood. 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 have lived on--don't take it from me now!
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Edith Wharton |
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5abac28
|
The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. ("The Triumph Of The Night")"
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winter
new-england
freezing
ice
new-hampshire
snow
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Edith Wharton |
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1946cbc
|
The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the 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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c069dd2
|
The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied.
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Edith Wharton |
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72fd3d1
|
She had always dimly guessed him to be in touch with important people, involved in complicated relations--but she felt it all to be so far beyond her understanding that the whole subject hung like a luminous mist on the farthest verge of her thoughts. In the foreground, hiding all else, there was the glow of his presence, the light and shadow of his face, the way his short-sighted eyes, at her approach, widened and deepened as if to draw he..
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Edith Wharton |
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912ae86
|
Ah, he would take her beyond---beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of her soul.
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the-house-of-mirth
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Edith Wharton |
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3f12e15
|
and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
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Edith Wharton |
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6792045
|
Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. 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 m..
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Edith Wharton |
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eb02cf4
|
She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses.
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Edith Wharton |
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9db6ca5
|
His days were full and they were filled decently, he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.
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Edith Wharton |
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b7476ad
|
Each was anxious to play the part fate had allotted to him, and each was dimly conscious of an inability to remain confined in it, and painfully aware that their secret problems would have been unintelligible to most men of their own class and kind.
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Edith Wharton |
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4920bb7
|
You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was so often slammed by careless hands. As if anyone could be bored by such dreams as hers!
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Edith Wharton |
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029e3f3
|
He pocketed his watch with a milder look, and began to turn about busily in the empty shell of his own mind. His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at it's centre to the exact limit of his occupations and interests.
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Edith Wharton |
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1b48b0f
|
All the girls feared their Father less than they did their Mother, because she sometimes remembered things and he did not. Lord Brightlingsea was swept through life on a steady amnesiac flow.
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Edith Wharton |
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377a8b0
|
Lizzy Elmsworth was not a good-tempered girl, but she was too intelligent to let her temper interfere with her opportunities.
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Edith Wharton |
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8610bbc
|
Though he sought simplicity, he dread dulness. Dimly conscious that he was dull himself, he craved the stimulus of a quicker mind; yet he feared a dull wife less than a brilliant one, for with the latter how could he maintain his superiority?
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Edith Wharton |
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9c60826
|
Obviously he had aspired too high, or been too impatient; but it was his nature to be aspiring and impatient, and if he was to succeed it must be on the lines of his own character.
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Edith Wharton |
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9b3ef87
|
These Americans, under their forthcoming manner, their surface-gush, as some might call it, have an odd reticence about what goes on underneath.
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Edith Wharton |
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c6c335c
|
She has been better educated than her sister, and has a more receptive mind. It seems as though someone had sown in a bare field a sprinkling of history, poetry, and pictures, and every seed had shot up in a flowery tangle.
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Edith Wharton |
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34482d8
|
But she had the awful gift of omnipresence, of exercising her influence from a distance; so that while the old family friends and visitors at Longlands said, "It's wonderful, now tactful Blanche is - how she keeps out of the young people's way," every member of the household, from its master to the last boots and scullion and gardener's boy, knew that Her Grace's eyes was on them all."
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Edith Wharton |
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ce940f2
|
The words came out slowly, haltingly, as if they had cost him a struggle. Nan had noticed before now that anger was too big a garment for him; it always hung on him in uneasy folds.
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Edith Wharton |
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6743cdf
|
Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage ov..
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Edith Wharton |
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4b55714
|
Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer. 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. His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.
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romance
love
lonelinessiness
superficiality
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Edith Wharton |
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87cb64b
|
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.
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Edith Wharton |
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c680854
|
To keep a kind of republic of the spirit--that's what I call success.
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Edith Wharton |
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559619c
|
The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is the truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her"
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wealth
women
truth
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Edith Wharton |
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7ab937c
|
She was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.
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Edith Wharton |
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b25c94f
|
And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.
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Edith Wharton |
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38c17af
|
Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!
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Edith Wharton |
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52493e8
|
He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.
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Edith Wharton |
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58ac1d2
|
Ethan looked at her with loathing. She was no longer the listless creature who had lived at his side in a state of sullen self-absorption, but a mysterious alien presence, an evil energy secreted from the long years of silent brooding. It was the sense
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Edith Wharton |
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38739fe
|
That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.
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Edith Wharton |
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7391b90
|
The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them.
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Edith Wharton |
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8b9706b
|
His heart beat with awe: he felt that he had never before beheld love visible.
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Edith Wharton |
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c7ec3d8
|
Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!
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Edith Wharton |
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e641c36
|
As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts. But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rathe..
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Edith Wharton |
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a8891f2
|
Jack Stepney had once said of Miss Van Osburgh that she was as reliable as roast mutton. His own taste was in the line of less solid and more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger makes any fare palatable, and there had been times when Mr. Stepney had been reduced to a crust.
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Edith Wharton |
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7c07628
|
The world] is not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms - and above all, my dear, not alone!
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Edith Wharton |
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0c9e4f7
|
individual destiny is to a large extent defined, and human potential frequently circumscribed, by social conventions as ephemeral as they are ''inscrutable.
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Edith Wharton |
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8d87e65
|
Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.
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goodness
gerty-farish
lily-bart
the-house-of-mirth
reputation
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Edith Wharton |