Lily Bart Quotes

“He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life?”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“How beautiful it was---and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“You asked me just now for the truth---well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talk about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing . . .”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.”
― Edith Wharton