"With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other."

"It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country."

"But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer."

"Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment and it helped me. It has always helped me."

"The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background."

"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."

"To know when to be generous and when firm-that is wisdom."

"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages,' she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.'It's their armour,' he thought, 'their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it.' And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe."

"I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!"

"High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night is not, autumn is not--but the flowOf vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,Poured from the far world's flaming boundariesIn waxing tides of unimagined glow.And to that height illumined of the mindhe calls us still by the familiar way,Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,Befogged in failure, chilled with love's decay--Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,How on the heights is day and still more day."

"Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can?"

"So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air."

"Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there."

"An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences."

"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."

"Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board."

"She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves."

"The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing."

"Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--yourold self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart"

"A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue."

"A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."

"He could not imagine being bored by Susy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend."

"Each time you happen to me all over again."

"Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it."

"The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future."

"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."

"They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods."

"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 duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites."

"To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?"

"Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!' she cried. 'I can't go back now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you up."

"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."

"What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that."

"What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out."

"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..."

"Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins."

"This new resolve gave her a sort of light-headed self-confidence: when she left the dinner-table she felt so easy and careless that she was surprised to see that the glass of champagne beside her plate was untouched. She felt as if all its sparkles were whirling through her."

"Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death."

"One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are."

"Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?"

"Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive."

"Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together."

"Her failure was a useful preliminary to success."

"There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul."

"Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair."

"Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down."

"Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one."

"I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they're about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton."

"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"

"I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome."

"Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good."