I was a failure in Boston...because they thought I was too fashionable to be intelligent, and a failure in New York because they were afraid I was too intelligent to be fashionable.

Archer was too intelligent to think that a young woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her even though it were against her will.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

When people ask for time, it's always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesn't take half as long to say.

Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free.

whatever the uses of a room, they are seriously interfered with if it be not preserved as a world by itself.