Sarah Mustafa

“His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,” struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Does no one want to know the truth here, Mr Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.”
― Edith Wharton