So close to the powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely in their air.
Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape,” Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, “on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?
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 arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance.
When two people part who have loved each other it is as if what happens between them befell in a great emptiness – as if the tearing asunder of the flesh must turn at last into a disembodied anguish.
There was money enough... but she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would understand her- no one would pity her- and he, who did both, was powerless to come to her aid.
You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact!
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.
Lily had no real intimacy with nature but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations.
But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good and I like being happy.
Xingu!” she scoffed. “Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more about it than she did – unprepared though we were – that made Osric Dane so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!
There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry – architecture being the least banal derivative of the latter.
Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already shut its golden doors upon her.
Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs. “How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman.” She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.
You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human enduring-that’s all.
Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.
The idea that reading is a moral quality has unhappily led many conscientious persons to renounce their innocuous dalliance with light literature for more strenuous intercourse. These are the persons who “make it a rule to read.
The youngest, dumpiest, dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh, with unsurpassed astuteness, had “placed” one by one in enviable niches of existence!
Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.
He turned to me, full of a terrifying benevolence.
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?