But marriage is one long sacrifice.... Chapter 21, Medora Manson speaking to Newland Archer

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 desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.

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.

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.

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company.

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.