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.

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 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.