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.

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...