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0dde2ba
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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. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.
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Edith Wharton |
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476cb79
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And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!" "
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Edith Wharton |
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758b7eb
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And for a long while they stood side by side without speaking, each seeing the other in every line of the landscape.
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Edith Wharton |
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c608076
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She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.
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Edith Wharton |
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2b9f2f6
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She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.
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jealousy
popularity
vanity
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Edith Wharton |
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81e3cae
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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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Edith Wharton |
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0834cec
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Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.
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Edith Wharton |
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36295e7
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As soon as he heard of the Sillerton's party he had said to himself that the Marchioness Manson would certainly come to Newport with the Blenkers, and that Madame Olenska might again take the opportunity of spending the day with her grandmother. At any rate, the Blenker habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able, without indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it. He was not sure that he wanted to see the Coun..
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Edith Wharton |
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bbea56e
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Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?
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solitude
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Edith Wharton |
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9d622c8
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The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. She was straightforward, loyal, and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at his jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing sou..
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Edith Wharton |
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745b214
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So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.
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change
sanctification
dissonance
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Edith Wharton |
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b396bb4
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Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down
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temptation
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Edith Wharton |
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cefbbc5
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I cannot picture what the life of the spirit would have been without him. He found me when my mind and soul were hungry and thirsty, and he fed them till our last hour together. It is such comradeships, made of seeing and dreaming, and thinking and laughing together, that make one feel that for those who have shared them there can be no parting.
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Edith Wharton |
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123486c
|
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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65cc2be
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She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
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Edith Wharton |
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572a49e
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She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.
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Edith Wharton |
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e9d1b49
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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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caa26b0
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It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.
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transitions
pretense
new-york
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Edith Wharton |
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8f461f6
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The stillness was so profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the sno..
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Edith Wharton |
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1d7200b
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Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.
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Edith Wharton |
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6f55979
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She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.
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Edith Wharton |
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75377e4
|
Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs. Peniston's mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as 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 enfoldin..
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Edith Wharton |
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267af57
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The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.
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Edith Wharton |
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16aacb1
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Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
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Edith Wharton |
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9e81122
|
When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness - as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.
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Edith Wharton |
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0fbdcb9
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As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on the far edge of thought--she was afraid of not remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.
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Edith Wharton |
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4e4e9ad
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His own exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable..
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freedom
gender-inequality
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Edith Wharton |
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4ee962b
|
And suddenly, as he noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be desperate.
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Edith Wharton |
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3a582d4
|
That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.
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Edith Wharton |
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477ce99
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Folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom.
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wisdom
folly
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Edith Wharton |
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1ea9c89
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Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met.
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Edith Wharton |
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314d28d
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And the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues.
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Edith Wharton |
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6defccb
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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 familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his ..
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Edith Wharton |
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6615b13
|
Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.
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Edith Wharton |
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850bd9d
|
There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.
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Edith Wharton |
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1a5675f
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I can give you a cup of tea in no time-and you won't meet any bores.
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Edith Wharton |
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aafba22
|
If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?" Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it."
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marriage
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Edith Wharton |
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395068f
|
Lily had no real intimacy with nature but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.
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Edith Wharton |
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34a8196
|
It's rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people--the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.
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Edith Wharton |
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842fbfb
|
You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today. It's a part of your cleverness to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously.
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Edith Wharton |
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92d532f
|
Well--there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor his, but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own moral contempt for it and physical dependence on it, of his half-talents and her half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield.
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Edith Wharton |
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2752293
|
She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the experiences of her more privileged friends.
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shyness
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Edith Wharton |
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91ac7d5
|
The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt the latent ache and realized that after all he had not come off unhurt.
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Edith Wharton |
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f47904a
|
The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a pa..
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love
lawrence-selden
lily-bart
edith-wharton
the-house-of-mirth
elegance
grace
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Edith Wharton |