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.
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.
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom.
If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
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.
Don’t you ever mind,” she asked suddenly, “not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I’m convinced it all turns on that.
The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.
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.
..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
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.
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.
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.
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches
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.
The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
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.
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.
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.
Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the “new people” whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to
They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.
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.
I hate in-the-end kindnesses: they’re about as nourishing as the third day of cold mutton.
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people’s lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
The fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to bring them nearer than any explanation would have done.
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?
Don’t they always go from bad to worse? There’s no turning back–yourold self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
…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.
What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
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.
Believe me, all of you, the best way to help the places we live in is to be glad we live there.
…how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one’s self?
So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.
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.
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down
We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed until we drop.
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!
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.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Life is the only real counselor. Wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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.
If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.
Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
In any really good subject one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
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.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
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.