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

I went on steadily trying to ‘find out how to’; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote “Ethan Frome” that I...

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

. . . 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...

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.

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

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.

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

My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.

But is has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I’ve found that a good thing to remember.

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.

How I hate everything!

My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet

The visible world is a daily miracle, for those who have eyes and ears.

…how much did pride count in the ebullition of passions in his breast?

There is too much sour grapes for my taste in the present American attitude. The time to denounce the bankers was when we were all feeding off their gold plate; not now! At present they...

The mere idea of a woman’s appealing to her family to screen her husband’s business dishonour was inadmisible, since it was the one thing that the Family, as an institution, could not do.

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

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...

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...

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

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.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into...

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.

I can’t love you unless I give you up.

If we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.

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...

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

How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ”American” before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be...

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

The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.

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...

I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own merits … irrespective of stupid conventionalities… I mean, each woman’s right to her liberty.

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

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...

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

Do you know, I began to see what marriage is for. It’s to keep people away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each other can be saved from madness only...

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

If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which...

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...

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.

But marriage is a one long sacrifice.

If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we could have a pretty good time.

It was before him again in its completeness — the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom...

Xingu!” she scoffed. “Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did—unprepared though we were—that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough...

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

How beautiful it was—and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.

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