The Age of Innocence Quotes

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

“The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!”

“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?”

“The circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park. How should anyone coming from a wider world not feel the difference and be attracted by it?”

“I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong—an unfairness—to somebody else.... What sort of life could we build on such foundations?”

″...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.”

“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.”

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

″...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!”