The Age of Innocence Quotes

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Ah, good conversation — there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met-it may be another hundred before we meet again.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting it to come true.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I want - I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that -categories like that- won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Everything may be labelled- but everybody is not.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“With a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The very good people did not convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands - and you hated the things it asked of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before - and it's better than anything I've known.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“I can't love you unless I give you up.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder—the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them. ”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears.'
Well, she has opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say she blinds people. What she does is the contrary-she fastens their eyelids open, so they're never again in the blessed darkness.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence