Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down
Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.
Lizzy Elmsworth was not a good-tempered girl, but she was too intelligent to let her temper interfere with her opportunities.
It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissues.
I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when...
He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence.
Medora Manson, in her prosperous days, inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.
There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.
Imagination WAS the eagle that devoured Prometheus!
The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New Y...
The motions of her mind were as incalculable as the flit of a bird in the branches
She was BAD . . . always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad
It's rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people—the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.
It was before him again in its completeness -- the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never...
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage before a dreadfully polite...
If you're as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn't be divorced without it.
I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy
I went on steadily trying to 'find out how to'; but I wrote two or three novels without feeling that I had made much progress. It was not until I wrote Ethan Frome that I suddenly felt the artisan's f...