She always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of prudence.
Individual destiny is to a large extent defined, and human potential frequently circumscribed, by social conventions as ephemeral as they are ‘‘inscrutable.
And he could only follow the shadowy pantomime of their silhouettes
[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a decent fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal.
They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch...
They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.
There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.
There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry - architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.
Theodora usually found that her good intentions matured too late for practical results.
The whole truth? Miss Bart laughed. What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe.
The tragedy of the woman's death, and of his own share in it, were as nothing in the disaster of his bright irreclaimableness.
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.
The sudden heat of his tone made her colour mount again, not with a rush, but gradually, delicately, like the reflection of a thought stealing slowly across her heart.
The only way to not think about money is to have a great deal of it.You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe.
Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows.
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin, dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was conscious that even these trivial thi...
She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find...
Oh, I am—it's much safer to be fond of dangerous people.