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c362d13
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Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We're like patterns stenciled on a wall. Can't you and I strike out for ourselves, May?
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Edith Wharton |
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31f5b2d
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Just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again--I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM.
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Edith Wharton |
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3528d73
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Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.
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Edith Wharton |
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3c47f16
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She felt the pitiful inadequacy of this, and understood, with a sense of despair, that in her inability to express herself she must give him an impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it.
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Edith Wharton |
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7b66f56
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Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else... There are moments when a man's imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.
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resignation
growth
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Edith Wharton |
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8cabd67
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she likes being good, and I like being happy.
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Edith Wharton |
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868859d
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he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.
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Edith Wharton |
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63d06fc
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Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages..
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Edith Wharton |
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66f9486
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Denis Eady was the son of Michael Eady, the ambitious Irish grocer, whose suppleness and effrontery had given Starkfield its first notion of "smart" business methods, and whose new brick store testified to the success of the attempt. His son seemed likely to follow in his steps, and was meanwhile applying the same arts to the conquest of the Starkfield maidenhood. Hitherto Ethan Frome had been content to think him a mean fellow; but now he ..
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Edith Wharton |
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89a49b4
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As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.
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Edith Wharton |
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d8d5989
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Nima tuk nikoi ne zhelae da znae istinata, mist'r Arch'r? Da zhiveesh sred tezi dobri khora, koito iskat ot teb edinstveno da se prestruvash -- tova e istinskata samota!
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Edith Wharton |
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f49df7e
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High Pasture Come up--come up: in the dim vale below The autumn mist muffles the fading trees, But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow, Night is not, autumn is not--but the flow Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas, Poured from the far world's flaming boundaries In waxing tides of unimagined glow. And to that height illumined of the mind he calls us still by the familiar way, Le..
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inspiration
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Edith Wharton |
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4cb3872
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The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement--he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations.
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Edith Wharton |
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18b31ed
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His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement. ("The Triumph Of The Night")"
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resignation
embarrassment
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Edith Wharton |
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f4ff10a
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Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue--and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!
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Edith Wharton |
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5518565
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He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically.
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Edith Wharton |
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24faa05
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He remembered once hearing his grandmother... say plaintively: "Why daughter, I presume I can go without -- BUT I CAN'T ECONOMIZE."
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Edith Wharton |
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02723a6
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Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a Gentleman.' You'll never amount to any..
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Edith Wharton |
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947189b
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Every community classifies, coerces, and restricts its members in some fashion; the particulars vary, but compliance with social forms is an inescapable fact of human existence. The exaggerated requirements
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Edith Wharton |
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1abc37f
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In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance; their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their ..
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friends
edith-wharton
the-house-of-mirth
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Edith Wharton |
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ea1f6e4
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What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless How on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words."
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Edith Wharton |
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07c021a
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refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing
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superficiality
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Edith Wharton |
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a20c905
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Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.
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Edith Wharton |
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2dc3998
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life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.
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empathy
marion-mainwaring
the-buccaneers
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Edith Wharton |
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bc5f564
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Norton was supremely gifted as an awakener, and no thoughtful mind can recall without a thrill the notes of the first voice which has called it out of its morning dream.
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Edith Wharton |
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4caaa30
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Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad
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Edith Wharton |
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c7b90d3
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Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically: "Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it instead of spending it--"
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Edith Wharton |
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5b7fe57
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Lily's. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
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Edith Wharton |
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202b930
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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. There were a hundred million tickets in his lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of ..
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Edith Wharton |
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1e14fec
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they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.
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Edith Wharton |
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7e60fb6
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It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd.
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Edith Wharton |
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ee06f48
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no treasure-house of Atreus was ever as rich as a well-stored memory.
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Edith Wharton |
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dc7e1e9
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She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him.
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doomed-love
sad
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Edith Wharton |
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9394987
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He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go.
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Edith Wharton |
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c469e13
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He was as inexpressive as he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose silence is an interruption.
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Edith Wharton |
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ef67ed2
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Every drop of blood in Lily's veins invited her to happiness.
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Edith Wharton |
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09292bd
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the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?
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philosophy
society
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Edith Wharton |
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b247cbb
|
But I am born happy every morning,
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Edith Wharton |
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3fba1b8
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It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them."
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Edith Wharton |
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4d30a2b
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Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: 'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.
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Edith Wharton |
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6fb6002
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the same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.
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Edith Wharton |
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6ce5ddd
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As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a ..
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words
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Edith Wharton |
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7cc28f5
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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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Edith Wharton |
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4742294
|
But she saw that his eyes, which were sand-colored like his face, and sandy-lashed, had found another occupation. They were fixed on Conchita Closson, who sat opposite to him; they rested on her unblinkingly, immovably, as if she had been a natural object, a landscape or a cathedral, that one had traveled far to see, and had the right to look at as long as one chose. He's drinking her up like blotting paper. I thought they were better broug..
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Edith Wharton |