Quotes from The Age of Innocence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from The Age of Innocence

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

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Popular quotes

“Tibet has not yet been infested by the worst disease of modern life, the everlasting rush. No one overworks here. Officials have an easy life. They turn up at the office late in the morning and leave for their homes early in the afternoon. If an official has guests or any other reason for not coming, he just sends a servant to a colleague and asks him to officiate for him.
Women know nothing about equal rights and are quite happy as they are. They spend hours making up their faces, restringing their pearl necklaces, choosing new material for dresses, and thinking how to outshine Mrs. So-and-so at the next party. They do not have to bother about housekeeping, which is all done by the servants. But to show that she is mistress the lady of the house always carries a large bunch of keys around with her. In Lhasa every trifling object is locked up and double-locked.
Then there is mah-jongg. At one time this game was a universal passion. People were simply fascinated by it and played it day and night, forgetting everything else—official duties, housekeeping, the family. The stakes were often very high and everyone played—even the servants, who sometimes contrived to lose in a few hours what they had taken years to save. Finally the government found it too much of a good thing. They forbade the game, bought up all the mah-jongg sets, and condemned secret offenders to heavy fines and hard labor. And they brought it off! I would never have believed it, but though everyone moaned and hankered to play again, they respected the prohibition. After mah-jongg had been stopped, it became gradually evident how everything else had been neglected during the epidemic. On Saturdays—the day of rest—people now played chess or halma, or occupied themselves harmlessly with word games and puzzles.”
― Heinrich Harrer, quote from Seven Years in Tibet (Paladin Books)

“examinó en la penumbra del local las plateadas telarañas que caían del techo, las añosas estanterías con bolsitas de perejil, romero, culantro, menta, y las cajas con clavos, tornillos, granos, ojales, botones, entre estampas e imágenes de vírgenes, cristos, santos y santas, beatos y beatas, recortados de revistas y periódicos, algunas con velitas prendidas y otras con adornos que incluían rosarios, detentes y flores de cera y de papel.”
― Mario Vargas Llosa, quote from The Time of the Hero

“They were men linked more to one another, their schools, their own social class and their own concerns than they were linked to the country. Indeed, about one of them, Averell Harriman, there would always be a certain taint, as if somehow Averell were a little too partisan and too ambitious (Averell had wanted to be President whereas the rest of them knew that the real power lay in letting the President come to them; the President could take care of rail strikes, minimum wages and farm prices, and they would take care of national security).”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Best and the Brightest

“It was sort of my own personal apocalypse.”
― Nick Cole, quote from The Old Man and the Wasteland

“We are all a little wiser towards the end of our lives and the wisdom often comes from the pain suffered by oneself.”
― Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar, quote from Yayati: A Classic Tale of Lust

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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