Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you are doing.
And wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
He could not imagine being bored by Susy -- or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential enemies: she was s...
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.
It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
He had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.
And once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
[...] the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over?...
You mustn't tell your dreams. Miss Testvalley says nothing bores people so much as being told other people's dreams. Nan said nothing, but an iron gate seemed to clang shut in her - the gate that was...
There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new set...
There was such love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it and cherishing the thought that she was worthy of it.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
The invisible world of thought and conduct had been the frequent subject of his musings; but the other, tangible world was close to him too, spreading like a rich populous plain between himself and th...
The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppe...
She would not have put herself out so much to say so little.
She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.
She clutched her manuscript, carrying it tenderly through the crowd, like a live thing that had been hurt.
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; as
His days were full and they were filled decently, he supposed it was all a man ought to ask. Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.
Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--yourold self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart