"The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights."

"Nothing is more perplexing to a man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions."

"It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region."

"His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen."

"But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart."

"And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."

"They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything."

"...though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a fate she could not avert."

"Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not."

"Half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn't any."

"To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom."

"He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty."

"...I have always lived on contrasts! To me the only death is monotony. Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins."

"She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all."

"I was just a screw or cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else."

"I want to put my hand out and touch you. I want to do for you and care for you. I want to be there when you're sick and when you're lonesome."

"It is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be"

"Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?"

"He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear."

"Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"You thought I was a lovelorn mistress and I was really just an expensive prostitute."

"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!"