Yas

“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.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

“[B]ut he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.”
― 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

“The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.”
― Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence