Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
17 quotes
"With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other."
"..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune."
"As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep"
"The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!"
"There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe."
"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."
"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"
"Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them."
"She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check but as a guide to him."
"Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience..."
"Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!"
"She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves."
"It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country."
"Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one's self?"
"So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air."
"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. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery."