Newland Archer Quotes

“Women ought to be free—as free as we are.”

“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?”

“I can’t love you unless I give you up.”

″...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.”

“Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of the twists and turns and defenses of an instinctive guile.”

″...He asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence. Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!”

“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.”