Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.
Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites...
Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving toward the watcher on the shore.
По правде сказать, в её жизни с Фалмерами не было ни минуты покоя, но вся эта суматоха казалась Сюзи менее бессмысленной и потому менее утомительной, чем суета, которой сопровождалось существование лю...
Нима тук никой не желае да знае истината, мистър Арчър? Да живееш сред тези добри хора, които искат от теб единствено да се преструваш — това е истинската самота!
The stoic’s carelessness of material things, combined with the epicurean’s pleasure in them.
The same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own ran...
When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness - as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.
When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed.
What novels did you read when you were young, dear? I'm convinced it all turns on that.
Well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favorite sport of the angels, but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell.
Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection,
There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have...
Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene of continental idleness.
The young man had not been long at Donnaz without discovering that in that little world of crystallised traditions the chaplain was the only person conscious of the new forces abroad. It had never occ...
The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.
The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement—he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had n...
The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food and drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the cravin...
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into...