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Book: The Age of Innocence
Quotes of Book: The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
he had wanted, irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the real one in the summer-house. The longing was with him day and night, an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He could not see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. 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.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to herchildren, "all this modern newspaper rubbishabout a New York aristocracy. If there is one,neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong toit; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either.Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers werejust respectable English or Dutch merchants,who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. Oneof your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne'ssword after the battle of Saratoga. These arethings to be proud of, but they have nothing todo with rank or class. New York has alwaysbeen a commercial community, and there arenot more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of theword.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
He pulled the sash down and turned back. "Catch my death!" he echoed; and he felt like adding: "But I've caught it already. I am dead--I've been dead for months and months.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
As she sat thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
But in another moment she seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had dropped back into the usual, as a too adventurous child takes refuge in its mother's arms.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows. From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by balustrades and urns descended in the steel–engraving style to a small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with "specimen" trees {each of a different variety} rolled away to long ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast–iron ornaments; and below, in a hollow, lay the four–roomed stone house which the first Patroon had built on the land granted him in 1612. Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than thirty feet from its awful front.
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him?
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Edith Wharton _ The Age of Innocence
Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.
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