The return to reality was as painful as the return to consciousness after taking an anesthetic

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...

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

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

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

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

I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and–unnecessary.

My first few weeks in America are always miserable, because the tastes I am cursed with are all of a kind that cannot be gratified here, and I am not enough in sympathy with our...

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

Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.

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

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

A man doesn’t know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one’s fit for, even if there’s time for both.

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

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

The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other without a word seemed to the young man to bring...

Yes – it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and...

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

She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.

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

Poor May!” he said.”Poor? Why poor?” she echoed with a strained laugh.”Because I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you,” he rejoined, laughing also.For a moment she was silent; then she...

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.

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.

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

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

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....

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

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

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

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...

You asked me just now for the truth—well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talk about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.

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

Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities...

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...

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

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

What’s the use? 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.

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...

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech

Though he turned the pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand. Suddenly, among them, he lit on...

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

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...

Oh, Gerty, I wasn’t meant to be good.

After all, one knows one’s weak points so well, that it’s rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.

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.

…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...

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!

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.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

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