Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.

They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewel were displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces – the milky gleam of...

But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts...

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

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.

…the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to...

The very good people did not convince me; I felt they’d never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands – and you...

To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

High PastureCome up–come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night is not, autumn is...

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.

She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.

Everything about her was both vigorous and exquisite.

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions; conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding...

What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.

Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.

My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.

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...

…they who exchange their independence for the sweet name of Wife must be prepared to find all is not gold that glitters……Eş gibi tatlı bir kelime karşılığında özgürlüklerinden vazgeçenler, parlayan her şeyin altın olmadığını görmeye...

When people ask for time, it’s always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn’t take half as long to say.

Almost everybody in the neighborhood had ”troubles,” frankly localized and specified; but only the chosen had ”complications.” To have them was in itself a distinction, though it was also, in most cases, a death warrant....

You mustn’t tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people’s dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her – the gate...

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...

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive log past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big...

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.