Quotes · verified word for word in the text
Age of Innocence quotes
15 quotes from Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #541 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
Each time you happen to me all over again.
— Spoken by a character · XXIX
It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.
I can't love you unless I give you up.
— Spoken by a character · XVIII
The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!
— Spoken by a character · IX
Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.
— Spoken by a character · XX
"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"
— Spoken by a character · X
I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met--it may be another hundred before we meet again.
— Spoken by a character · XXIII
His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen.
And you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities.
— Spoken by a character · XXIX
"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that--categories like that--won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."
— Spoken by a character · XXIX
"Everything may be labelled--but everybody is not."
— Spoken by a character · IX
He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.
The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.
"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
— Spoken by a character · XIV
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.