Quotes & Sayings About Lily Bart

He had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied. — Edith Wharton

There is someone I must say goodbye to. Oh, not you - we are sure to see each other again - but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you - I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you. — Edith Wharton

But he could never be long without trying to find a reason for what she was doing ... — Edith Wharton

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. — Edith Wharton

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape," Lily muses as she contemplates the prospect of being bored all afternoon by Percy Grice, dull but undeniably rich, "on the bare chance that he might ultimately do her the honor of boring her for life? — Edith Wharton

The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of all the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part. — Edith Wharton

Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good. — Edith Wharton

How beautiful it was
and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtuseness of feeling of which she was less proud. — Edith Wharton

You asked me just now for the truth
well, the truth about any girl is that once she's talk about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks. — Edith Wharton