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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dec4f16 | Suddenly the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers Rome with a roof of silver. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 3fac140 | the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the epicurean's pleasure in them. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 2841e1d | Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 0670f0a | He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the 'younger set,' in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it. If he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he sometimes nearly did) he .. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 00e2997 | You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? | Edith Wharton | ||
| 891c739 | 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 about courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behavior of those who gave rise to them. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 4272f1c | You idiot!" said his wife, and threw down her cards." | Edith Wharton | ||
| 8b254bd | The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe." | Edith Wharton | ||
| fab174c | Todos vivian en una especie de mundo de acertijos, donde lo verdadero nunca se decia ni se hacia ni se pensaba. | Edith Wharton | ||
| e1084a4 | The whole truth?" Miss Bart laughed. "What is truth?" -- | Edith Wharton | ||
| f4d9f90 | There were moments of overwhelming lassitude, when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 80fb51f | For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. | Edith Wharton | ||
| a7e6da4 | I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda. | Edith Wharton | ||
| e76473c | But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop | Edith Wharton | ||
| 94a798e | Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 78257fb | It was as if the eager current of her being had been checked by a sudden obstacle which drove it back upon itself. She looked at him helplessly, like a hurt or frightened child: this real self of hers, which he had the faculty of drawing out of the depths, was so little accustomed to go alone! | Edith Wharton | ||
| 2b8a3c6 | Even when it's the other way round it ain't always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing's binding... and they say shipwrecked fellows'll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 46a9bf5 | She could only gather, from the silences and evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up--a woman who was of course "dreadful," and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been promptly discredited." | Edith Wharton | ||
| 0e218b6 | They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can't say as they've hurried much to make our acquaintance. | Edith Wharton | ||
| b316d50 | Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Juila was wounded in every fiber of her spirit. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 676588d | Why do you do this to me?" she cried. "Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?" "No, I have nothing to give you instead," he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. "If I had, it should be yours, you know." | Edith Wharton | ||
| eb6d603 | What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited? | Edith Wharton | ||
| 95e1545 | But these mysteries, and many others, were closely locked in Mr. Jackson's breast; for not only did his keen sense of honour forbid his repeating anything privately imparted, but he was fully aware that his reputation for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out what he wanted to know. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 1abc075 | She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to those on wheels. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 46d3dc0 | But now he felt as if her blush had set a flaming guard about her. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 844debd | He pulled the sash down and turned back. "Catch my death!" he echoed; and he felt like adding: "But I've caught it already. I am dead--I've been dead for months and months." | Edith Wharton | ||
| 528c6e0 | Age seemed to have come down on him as winter comes on the hills after a storm. | Edith Wharton | ||
| cf7122a | It was a world of fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. To such a banquet his wife naturally remained uninvited. The diet would have disagreed with her, and she would probably have objected to the other guests. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 250cfce | Any personal entanglement might mean "bother," and bother was the thing she most abhorred." | Edith Wharton | ||
| e25e57e | When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 4a76441 | And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite the same height, yet never below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change. | Edith Wharton | ||
| d13d52f | How impatience men are! All Jack has to do to get everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were going through an intricate dance where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time. | marraige | Edith Wharton | |
| 1bae44f | Her incapacity to recognize change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretense of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 290688d | Yes, you have been away a very long time. " "Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I'm sure I'm dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" | coming-home foreigner time | Edith Wharton | |
| 6014018 | He reviewed his friends marriages - the supposedly happy ones - and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgement, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming wh.. | relationship-quotes | Edith Wharton | |
| dd00d20 | 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 | ||
| b6fdd95 | Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds. | Edith Wharton | ||
| aee2cc8 | What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him? | Edith Wharton | ||
| fbc5a56 | People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, .. | Edith Wharton | ||
| b353d3c | But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in it.. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 6679aa7 | The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure. | Edith Wharton | ||
| b2ffacc | You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 2e7ad0d | As she sat thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her .. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 6cdc188 | Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. | Edith Wharton |