Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
... there are spines to which the immobility of worship is not a strain.
The effect produced by a short story depends almost entirely on its form.
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
Life is either always a tight-rope or a featherbed. Give me a tight-rope.
I'm afraid I'm an incorrigible life-lover, life-wonderer, and adventurer.
In all the arts abundance seems to be one of the surest signs of vocation.
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
traditions that have lost their meaning are the hardest of all to destroy.
In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert.
One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.
And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.
Yes, one gets over things. But there are certain memories one can't bit on.
I'd almost say it's the worries that make married folks sacred to each other.
Any rapidly enacted episode. . .should be seen through only one pair of eyes.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be
Blessed are the pure in heart for they have so many more things to talk about.
What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.
In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.
Life is always either; a tight -rope or a feather-bed . — Give me the tightrope.
It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.
She threw back her head with a laugh that made her chins ripple like little waves.
To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?
In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers.
When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble.
there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.
It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.
But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer
Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.
Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.
I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings.
In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires.
I wonder why rich people always grow fat I suppose it's because there's nothing to worry them.
Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?
A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys.
[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.
Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.
In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante.
...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.
Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.
People struggled on for years with 'troubles,' but they almost always succumbed to 'complications.
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.