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 things were inwoven with her deepest life.
The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.
He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.
Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue.
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 have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author’s political views.
Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.
The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ’em out.
The turnings of life seldon show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing.
The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity – their quality of being all things to all men, of being diversely moulded by the impact of fresh forms of thought.
You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute.
In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.
Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed.
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.
Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.
It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.