"I suppose 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."

"Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!"

"Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before."

"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling. I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down on me almost as much as the students."

"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."

"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."

"My little dog - a heartbeat at my feet."

"Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."

"The fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done."

"If the ability to read carries the average man no higher than the gossip of his neighbours, if he asks nothing more nourishing out of books and the theatre than he gets hanging about the store, the bar and the street-corner, then culture is bound to be dragged down to him instead of his being lifted up by culture."

"A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature."

"That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities, now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way."

"We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop."

"She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable."

"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 whichher beauty was a part."

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other."

"Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore."

"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."

"Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope."

"But it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune."

"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."

"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."

"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."

"He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime."

"Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats."

"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."

"In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears."

"Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life."

"How much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?"

"They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity."

"There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe."

"Silence may be as variously shaded as speech."

"Though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert."

"There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."

"If only we'd stop trying to be happy we'd have a pretty good time."

"Set wide the window. Let me drink the day."

"The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches."

"She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making."

"The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're no longer the persons who did the things we no longer understand. The trouble is, I suppose, that we change every moment; and the things we did stay."

"Life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know."

"As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep."

"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue."

"It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made."

"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."

"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision."

"I don't know if I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want someone who made it interesting."

"The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."

"I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views."

"The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."

"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 standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not able to live as they lived."