I can't love you unless I give you up.

What is one's personality, detached from that of the friends with whom fate happens to have linked one? I cannot think of myself apart from the influence of the two or three greatest friendships of my life, and any account of my own growth must be that of their stimulating and enlightening influence.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

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

I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.

If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of decoration.