Quotes from work

The Age of Innocence

“His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.”

“Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress.”

“… It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.”

“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”

“Poetry and art are the breath of life to her.”

“He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.”

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

“And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.”

“Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.”

“He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.”

“Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?”

“It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.”

“I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light.”

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

“Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.”

“I can't love you unless I give you up.”

“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”

“It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.”

“Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”