Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
To your generation, I must represent the literary equivalent of tufted furniture and gas chandeliers.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.
Think what stupid things the people must have done with their money who say they're 'happier without'.
It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them.
There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
Ah, good conversation - there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.
whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.
In the rotation of crops there was a recognized season for wild oats; but they were not sown more than once.
I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.
What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.
Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.
Since the Americans have ceased to have dyspepsia, they have lost the only thing that gave them any expression.
... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.
My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.
And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.
Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity.
I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.
Beauty (was)a gift which, in the eyes of New York, justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.
I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart
Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.
Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose.
I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.
When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.
I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
After all, one knows one's weak points so well, that it's rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.
...every literature, in its main lines, reflects the chief characteristics of the people for whom, and about whom, it is written.
...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.
She wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision.
In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.
To have you here, you mean-in reach and yet out of reach? To meet you in this way, on the sly? It's the very reverse of what I want.
Once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
To visit Morocco is still like turning the pages of some illuminated Persian manuscript all embroidered with bright shapes and subtle lines.
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.
One can remain alive ... if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity interested in big things and happy in small ways.
I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome.
For what endless years this life will have to go on! He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding blood in his veins.
Ah, the poverty, the miserable poverty, of any love that lies outside of marriage, of any love that is not a living together, a sharing of all!