Edith Wharton

Since then he had been walking with a ghost: the miserable ghost of his illusion. Only he had somehow vivified, coloured, substantiated it, by the force of his own great need _ as a man might breathe a semblance of life into a dear drowned body that he cannot give up for dead.

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

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.

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

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

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

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

Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It__ to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between them__hildren, duties, visits, bores, relations__he things that protect married people from each other. We__e been too close together__hat has been our sin. We__e seen the nakedness of each other__ souls.

...life makes ugly faces at us sometimes, I know.

His own exclamation: __omen should be free__s free as we are,_ struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. __ice_ women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore__n the heat of argument__he more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. 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.

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.

Sometimes life seems like a match between oneself and one's gaolors. The gaolers, of course, are one's mistakes; and the question is, who'll hold out longest? When I think of that, life instead of being too long, seems as short as a winter day....

She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted." Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.

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

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?

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.

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

You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one'spowers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, andtook to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a soi. And when one hears goodtalk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer itinwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worthbreathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of thesame self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "Voyez-vous, Monsieur,to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one must earnenough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a `private' anything--is almostas chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge:an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America-- in NewYork?