She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.
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.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.
...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
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 developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
Mothers and daughters are part of each other's consciousness, in different degrees and in a different way, but still with the mutual sense of something which has always been there. A real mother is just a habit of thought to her children.
Inkstands and tea-cups are never as full as when one upsets them.
...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.
We ought to be opening a bottle of wine!
I think sometimes that it is almost a pity to enjoy Italy as much as I do, because the acuteness of my sensations makes them rather exhausting; but when I see the stupid Italians I have met here, completely insensitive to their surroundings, and ignorant of the treasures of art and history among which they have grown up, I begin to think it is better to be an American, and bring to it all a mind and eye unblunted by custom.
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
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 freshness.
Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board.
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. Edith Wharton ~ The Touchstone
I am secretly afraid of animals.... I think it is because of the usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which beliesit, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them: left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? their eyes seem to ask us.
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.
The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost.
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
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.
Leisure, itself the creation of wealth, is incessantly engaged in transmuting wealth into beauty by secreting the surplus energy which flowers in great architecture, great painting and great literature. Only in the atmosphere thus engendered floats that impalpable dust of ideas which is the real culture. A colony of ants or bees will never create a Parthenon.
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