Status Updates From The House of Mirth

She looked at him gently. 'Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living. Goodbye.'

Once again, Lily had withdrawn from an ambiguous situation in time to save her self-respect, but too late for public vindication.

You asked me if I could understand why Ned spent so much money. He spends it on living with the rich. You think we live on the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but it's a privilege we have to pay for! We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes and their cars—yes, but there's a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries

Lily was not of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost.

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.

Society did not tum away fom her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to the fall measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour.

It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

And the power to make him so lay in her hand-lay there in a completeness he could not even remotely conjecture. Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke—there was something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity. She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation.