"The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your friends have lost."

"They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets."

"Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?"

"He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied."

"They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods."

"Everything about her was warm and soft and scented; even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose."

"The only way to not think about money is to have a great deal of it." You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe."

"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ..."

"I can't love you unless I give you up."

"There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free."

"Then stay with me a little longer,' Madame Olenska said in a low tone, just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch, but it thrilled him like a caress."

"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"

"True originality consists not in a new manner, but in a new vision."

"It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness."

"Her mind was an hotel where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their address behind, and frequently without paying for their board."

"Poetry and art are the breath of life to her."

"What a shame it is for a nation to be developing without a sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast."

"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."

"We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with ours."

"...It was one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it."

"How I hate everything!"

"...and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not."

"He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her."

"She had taken everything else from him, and now she meant to take the one thing that made up for it all."

"Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven."

"Every house is a mad-house at some time or another."

"He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled dreams of an inarticulate lifetime."

"Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury. It was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in."

"Her failure was a useful preliminary to success."

"It was too late for happiness - but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I haved lived on - don't take it from me now"

"A smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence."

"Life is the only real counselor; wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not become a part of the moral tissue."

"But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer"

"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."

"No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity"

"Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind of people who only ask one to pretend!"

"We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?"

"A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys."

"They stood together in the gloom of the spruces, an empty world glimmering about them wide and gray under the stars"

"I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes."

"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."

"..but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, if breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune."

"Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them."

"Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation."

"...he arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life"

"I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary."

"It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country."

"The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal."

"One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace"

"One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are."