Quotes from book

The Portrait of a Lady

“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”

“You must save what you can of your life; you musn't lose it all simply because you've lost a part.”

“She had an immense curiosity about life, and was constantly staring and wondering.”

“Don't mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

“If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.”

“Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.”

“Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.”

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”

“And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.”

“One can't judge till one's forty; before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”

“… and the great advantage of being a literary woman, was that you could go everywhere and do everything.”

“A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.”

“She had a certain way of looking at life which he took as a personal offense.”

“It's not my fate to give up--I know it can't be.”

“… he had long decided that abundant laughter should be the embellishment of the remainder of his days.”

“I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose." said Isabel”

“Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she should find herself in a difficult position, so that she might have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.”

“Things are always different than what they might be… If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.”

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”