Quotes About Society

if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any unconventional action to—to offensive insinuations—'' She

Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other indomitable huntresses of erudition.

A sua afirmação - as mulheres deviam ser livres, livres como nós - ia até ao fundo de um problema que no seu mundo se convencionara não existir. Boas mulheres, embora injustiçadas, nunca exigiriam o género de liberdade que ele pensava, e homens de espírito generoso como ele ficavam - assim no calor do argumento - cavalheirescamente prontos para conceder-lha.

Edith Wharton

I didn't know Countesses were so neighborly.

You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You're right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.

The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

She's a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph

Mrs. Fairford smiled. "I've sometimes thought," she mused, "that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he's the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman—and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it.

You've put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they've invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.

Pero, en primer lugar, Nueva York era una metrópolis perfectamente consciente de que en las grandes capitales no era bien visto llegar temprano a la ópera; y lo que era o no era bien visto jugaba un rol tan importante en la Nueva York de Newland Archer como los inescrutables y ancestrales seres terroríficos que habían dominado el destino de sus antepasados miles de años atrás.

Undine Spragg—how can you? her mother wailed, raising a prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid bell-boy had just brought in.

Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but 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.

Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shift-fronts and fresh glacé gloves.

Los más tradicionales le tenían cariño precisamente por ser pequeña e incómoda, lo que alejaba a los nuevos ricos a quienes Nueva York empezaba a temer, aunque, al mismo tiempo, le simpatizaban.

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 real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend.

Društvo je nebesko telo koje se okre?e i treba ga procenjivati na osnovu mesta koje zauzima na nebu svakog pojedinca; a trenutno je svoju svetlost usmeravalo ka Lili.

Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables.

Every one in polite circles knew that, in America, a gentleman couldn't go into politics. But

It was the old New York way, of taking life 'without effusion of blood''; the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency about courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than 'scenes,' except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.

It's all stupid and narrow and unjust—but one can't make over society.

Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.