"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."

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

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

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

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

"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!"

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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"

"Her failure was a useful preliminary to success."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"How I hate everything!"

"...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."

"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."

"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."