Delirious Disquisitions

“I want to gain immortality because of my brain and not because of the potential of my womb.”
― Sheena Patel, I'm a Fan

“It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes," said Mrs. Archer distantly.
"Why not?" broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative. "Why shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses? Why should she slink about as if it were she who had disgraced herself? She's 'poor Ellen' certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage; but I don't see that that's a reason for hiding her head as if she were the culprit.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.....
He could not get away from the fact that if he had been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity) why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of experience as himself.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“A man who plants a tree could never be called a pessimist.”
― Iain Cameron Williams, The KAHNS of Fifth Avenue