As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.
Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making.
They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewel were displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an envious throb as she caught the refraction of light from their surfaces – the milky gleam of perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies reli...
In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities. She liked their elegance; their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascen...
Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.
What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for...
She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, an...
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 I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere...
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me.
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats.
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.
Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down
You asked me just now for the truth---well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talk about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.
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
The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of 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 to act which never...
