The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh.
Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that no...
Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands wi...
The greatest mistake is to think that we ever know why we do things...I suppose the nearest we can ever come to it is by getting what old people call 'experience.' But by the time we've got that we're...
High PastureCome up--come up: in the dim vale belowThe autumn mist muffles the fading trees,But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breezeHas stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,Night...
Her failure was a useful preliminary to success.
It was 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.
Colonnade:
What do you call the weak point? He paused. The fact that the average American looks down on his wife.
Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things.
Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.
Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his...
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.
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the l...
It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised.
Life is the only real counselor wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe.
THE TOUCHSTONE
She seemed always to have seen him through a blur - first of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference - and now the fog had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable.
One of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. You might as well say that the only way not to think...