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

"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."

"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."

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

"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"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at so long that I'd ceased to see them."

"The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future."

"There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask."

"It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes."

"...In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers..."

"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"

"In every heart there should be one grief that is like a well in the desert."

"I shan't be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light."